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DUKE 
UNIVERSITY 


DIVINITY SCHOOL 
LIBRARY 


SERMONS ON. 
LIVING SUBJECTS 


BY 


HORACE BUSHNELL 


Centenary Edition 


NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
I9IO 


CONTENTS. 


se 


MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 


Luke 1: 28.—“ And the angel came in unto her and said, 
Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee; 
blessed art thou among women.”.............eee cece cence 9 


Il. 


LOVING GOD IS BUT LETTING GOD LOVE US. 


i Joun 4: 16.—“ And we have known and believed the love 
that God hath to us.”..... Ses Say eae ic SEES posesae 37 


Ill. 


FEET AND WINGS. 
A EZEKIEL 1: 24.—‘‘ When they stood, they let down their wings.” 655 


T¥. 


THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 


II Cor. 4: 6—“ For God who commanded the light to shine 
out of darkness hath shined in, our hearts, to give the 
light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of 
Spsusy Christy: 55 222s ee s.t ie eee eistctofes« Socidaticts Shad 73 


¥v. 


THE COMPLETING OF THE SOUL. 


Cot. 2: 10.—‘* Aud ye are complete in him which is the head 
of all principality and power.”............ dice, Ds OU Sea 96 


225988 


CONTENTS. 


VI. 


THE IMMEDIATE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
I Cor. 15: 34.—“ For some have not the knowledge of God.”.. 114 


VII. 


RELIGIOUS NATURE AND RELIGIOUS CHAR- 
j ACTER. 


Acts 17: 27.—‘‘That they should seek the Lord, if haply 
they might feel after him and find him, though he be not far 


from every one of US.”...... .\0'< cists = silane in diniaiate aleiale Qe austp ees 
ViEt. 
THE PROPERTY RIGHT WE ARE TO GET IN 
SOULS. 
II Cor. 12: 14—“ For I seek not yours, but you.”............ 148 
Txe 


THE DISSOLVING OF DOUBTS. 


Dante, 5: 16.—‘‘ And I have heard of thee, that thou canst 
make interpretations and dissolve doubts.”................. 166 


D. & 


CHRIST REGENERATES EVEN. THE DESIRES. 


Mark 10: 35.—‘“‘And James and John, the sons of Zebedee, 
came unto him saying, Master, we would that thou shouldest 
do for us whatsoever we shall desire.”........ Oe oe «. 185 


p.G iA 


A SINGLE TRIAL BETTER THAN MANY. 


Hes. 9; 27.—‘‘And as it is appointed unto men once to die, 
but after this the judgment...............eeeeee aie eis! <\acerotah Re 


OONTENTS. 


XII. 


SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. 


Ps. 26: 2—‘ Examine me, O Lord, and prove me, try my 
Wes ANG Wy MOAT iyo) einie\e nye 01s sjele/o a cle/a)ehe)alsivie cin) eins) =’ a)e 224 


XIII. 


HOW TO BE A CHRISTIAN IN TRADE. 


Marra. 25: 16.—"Then he that had received the five talents 
went and traded with the same, and made them other five 


XIV. 


IN AND BY THINGS TEMPORAL ARE GIVEN 
THINGS ETERNAL. 

II Cor. 4: 18.—‘‘ While we look, not at the things which are 
seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things 
which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not 
SHSLMAI MOLOMALL lari relvioleicis elalsialaiera(aiale‘ate\s cl slaieiaayaleoin(els wielala 268 


ZV. 


GOD ORGANIZING IN THE CHURCH HIS ETER- 
NAL SOCIETY. 

Hes. 12: 22-3.—" But ye are come unto Mount Zion, and unto 
the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an 
innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and 
church of the first-born, which are written in heaven, and to 
God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made 
ESLER Uae Malye aie iatuim che claie elevavaleyejsininie ateaeinte aia aiel evaleis silslolalmialehelesete 285 


EVES 


ROUTINE OBSERVANCE INDISPENSABLE. 
Mart. 6: 11.—“Give us this day our daily bread.”.......... 308 


CONTENTS. 


XVII. 
OUR ADVANTAGE IN BEING FINITE. 


Hes. 2: 7.—‘Thou madest him a little lower than the angels, 
thou crownedst him with glory and honor, and didst set 
him ‘over ‘the works’ of thy hands.” [oc .ccucaieeeenee ee 329 


XVIII. 
THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. 


Acts 10: 34-5.—“Of a truth I perceive that God is no re- 
specter of persons. But in every nation, he that feareth 
him and worketh righteousness is accepted with him.”.... 352 


XIX. 


FREE TO AMUSEMENTS, AND TOO FREE TO 
WANT THEM. 
I Cor. 10: 27.—"“If any of them that believe not bid you 
to a feast, and ye be disposed to go, whatever is set be- 
fore you eat, asking no question for conscience’ sake.”... 374 


XX. 
THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 


II Tim. 2: 3-4.—“Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good 
soldier of Jesus Christ. No man that warreth entangleth 
himself with the affairs of this life, that he may please 


him who hath chosen him to be a soldier.”......... bie sand 
XXII. 
THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 
Rev. 22: 1.—‘The throne of God and of the Lamb.”....... 418 
IX OXON 
OUR RELATIONS TO CHRIST IN THE FUTURE 
LIFE. 


I Cor. 15: 28.—‘‘ And when all things shall be subdued unto 
him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that 
put all things under him, that God may be all in all.....,..,. 442 


~ SERMONS ON ~ 
LIVING SUBJECTS 


I. 
MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 


“ And the angel came in unto her and said, Hail thou that art highly 
favored, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women.’— 
Inuke 1; 28. 

Wuar an angel may count the most blessed and 
dearest lot of favor to befall a spotless and fair young 
woman, will not of course coincide with what her 
mortal well-wishers, even the best of them, might 
choose. Probably the being entered into such a story 
as the angel here opens to Mary, in a strain of high con- 
gratulation, would be regarded, at the time, by scarcely 
any one as a thing to be at all desired, whatever esti- 
mation might be had of the honor conferred, after ages 
of history have shown the stupendous significance of 
the event. Mary is at first confused and troubled, 
“casting in her mind what sort of salutation this’ 
should be,” and her heavenly visitor has much to do to 
compose her fluttering breast. And how shall he do 
it more easily than by telling her that what she will 
receive is God’s reward. “Fear not, Mary, for thou 
hast found favor with God.” He does not say, ob- 
serve, that the favor of God has found her, but that 
she has found favor with him. The expression, it is 


(9) 


10 MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 


true, may be used in either way, to indicate what God 
has undertaken to do for her, or what she has obtained 
by the suit of her gentle, sweet-minded prayers. It is 
most naturally taken in this latter way; giving us to 
see how she has been waiting before Him, from her 
tender girlhood onward, asking of Him grace for a 
good life, and questioning His oracle as to what she is 
to do, or to be. She has read the prophets too, as we 
may judge, and her feeling, like all the religious feel- 
ing of her nation, is leavened in this manner, by 
indefinite yearnings for the coming of that wonderful 
unknown being called Messiah. And so her opening 
womanly nature has been stretching itself Messiah- 
ward, and configuring itself inwardly to what the 
unknown Great One is to be. Sighing after him thus, 
in the sweet longings of her prayers, she is winning 
such favor, and becoming inwardly akin to him in 
such degree, as elects her to bear the promised child 
of the skies, and be set in a properly divine mother- 
hood before the worlds! Ah yes, Mary, canst thou 
believe it? that which the prophets of so many ages 
drew you into praying for, that which angels in 
God’s highest and most ancient realms have been 
peering from above to look into, that for which the 
fullness of time has now come—that special thing of 
God’s counsel, supereminent forever, his greatest 
miracle, his unmatched wonder, his one thing absolute, 
which lets nothing ever come to pass that can be put 
into class with it—even that thou hast gotten a call 
from God to mediate for the world, bearing it as thy 


MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 11 


Holy Thing, the fruit of thy sweet life and maidenly 
prayers. 

I do not undertake, of course, to say that Mary’s 
prayers, however freighted with longings after Messiah 
to come, had really prevailed with God to be incarnate, 
but only that she drew to herself, by her singular trust 
and pure spotlessness of devotion, what was to be by 
some one, and came to her more fitly than to any 
other, because of the finer, more dear quality found in 
her life. But that she won this honor does not take 
her out of the class of women, or entitle her in any 
sense, to the honors of worship. It lifts her truly 
enough above all woman or even human kind, and 
shows her touching the zenith in the sky of God’s 
honors, where no other mortal ever touched before, or 
probably ever will in the future ages. Still when we 
say, “other mortal,” in this manner, we call her 
mortal too. 

There has been a large recoil of unbelief, as we all 
know, from these first chapters of Matthew and Luke, 
reciting the birth-story of the incarnation. How 
comes it, many ask, and some of you perhaps are in 
the question now—how comes it, if this be any proper 
history of facts, that it is made up by a sifting in so 
largely of poetic material—legendary myths, and half- 
recollections in verse? These good people, having no 
specially poetic gift, talk poetry, all, as if it were their 
element. When Mary, on a visit to Elizabeth up in 
the hill country, enters and offers salutation, she breaks 
out, on a sudden, in a hymn of benediction. Where: 


12 MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 


upon Mary, in turn, responds in her famous magnijicat, 
occupying ten whole verses of the story. Next Zach- 
arias celebrates the birth of John, in a hymn of praise 
and prophecy. Then the angel, coming down to 
notify the shepherds that Christ is born at Bethlehem, 
can not do his errand without putting it in verse. A 
grand irruption of angels follows, filling the sky with 
song and holy gratulation, which they too put in He- 
brew verse. Next comes the aged Simeon, chanting 
his nunc dimittis over the divine child in the temple. 
Anna the prophetess follows, giving “‘ thanks to God,” 
in words not given, but understood to be in verse. 
What account now shall we make of this? First, 
there is, we must observe, so great facility of verse in 
the Hebrew and Syriac tongues, that minds but a very 
little excited almost naturally break into the couplet 
form of utterance. Next the incarnation itself is an 
event so auspicious and glorious, that every body know- 
ing it ought to be taken by some great mental commo- 
tion, lifted by some unwonted inspiration. Any most 
common soul ought to kindle as in flame, and break ont 
in poetic improvisings. Having wings in the religious 
outfit of our nature, it would even be a kind of celes- 
tial impropriety, if God’s Spirit did not spread them 
here. Why the very ground ought to let forth its 
reverberated music, and all the choirs, and lyres, and 
ringing cymbals of the creation, between the two hori- 
zons and above, ought to be discoursing hymns, and 
pouring down their joy, even as the stars dolight! It 
looks very strange to me now, that I once hung a long 


MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 13 


time over the scandal matter of these poetic episodes ; 
till finally I found grace to make the discovery, that 
they are exactly what and where they ought to be, 
and that, instead of doubting, I ought even to be be- 
lieving, just because of them. They are, in fact, pro- 
prieties only of the incarnation; for what have we in 
it but the very nearly one event of the world? This 
of course any one may doubt if he will, but no sane 
person, I think, can deny that it is either a transaction 
so great, or else it is nothing. It may not be a fact, 
but if it is, which is the exact matter here assumed, it 
can not be less than what these incidents and demon- 
strations signify. Furthermore, I will even dare to 
aver, that the manner of this incarnation story is nat- 
ural, as it could be in no other possible way, and is 
cast in a form of the strongest possible self-affirmation. 
It comes to pass in just the only way conceivable, or 
credible. Thus if there were no divine election here of 
the mother, no annunciation to her of her office, noth- 
ing but a birth, whence coming or how she could not 
explain; or if it came in wedlock unhymned, bringing 
no evidence but the remarkable quality finally to be dis- 
covered of the child; or if it were a possession taken 
of some full grown man, to be divinely empowered 
and set on by the visibly deific forces bodied in him; 
who could ever become certified of an incarnation ac- 
complished under any such conditions? Besides, the 
very word itself implies a visible insphering in flesh, 
and how can that be accomplished without a birth 
into it? and how that, without a divine overshadow te 
2 


14 MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 


quicken and matriculate that birth? In short, there. 
must be a Mary in the process, or it will not be done. 
And then just all the wonders of story and ‘music of 
song that were staggering our faith, are seen to be 
only the proper all-hail, or fit salutation of the advent 
made. 


At this point my subject, which is Mary the mother 
of Jesus, takes a most remarkable turn that we might 
not have expected. Suddenly, as it were at once, she 
drops out of improvising, out of song and singing joy, 
into a very nearly total and dumb silence; giving us 
to hear no spoken word again, save in a very few syl- 
lables and but twice in her whole after-life. The 
magnificat she chanted in the hill country was her last, 
as it was her first, improvising, the swan song, as we 
may call it, of her life. She and her husband, “ mar- 
veled,” we are told, “at those things that were 
spoken ” of the child, in the scores of hymn and music 
offered for him in the temple; and at that point they 
dropped into still life, as it were by paralysis, never 
once to speak of their extraordinary son, or testify any 
least impression of his remarkable person, or story, or 
gifts, or office. Things were occurring, no doubt, 
every day, by which he was differed more and more 
widely from all common children, and by which they 
were partly dazed or confounded. They began very 
soon to feel themselves overtopped by the altitude of 
his questions, and the superhuman affinity of his senti- 
ments. Still they could only say the less of his dem- 


MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 15 


onstrations, that they had connection back with his 
miraculous story, of which they could not well permit 
themselves to speak. But to hint the feeling growing 
up in the house, as he best knows how, the evangelist 
represents that the child ‘grew and waxed strong in 
spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was 
upon him.” His being noticed in this way before he 
was twelve years old, indicates a mysterious, extraor- 
dinary something growing visible in him. 

Meantime Joseph and Mary, without indulging any 
fond talk about him as their prodigy, did what they 
could to give him the rudiments of an education. 
They at least taught him to read. And when, after- 
ward, he rose up in the synagogue, where, as we are told, 
it “was his custom” to attend, and had been doubt- 
less from his childhood, he went forward to the sacred 
chest for his manuscript, and turned directly to the 
Messianic promise of Isaiah, as being already well 
versed in prophecy, and began to read, saying, “ this 
day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.” And so 
far had his education been carried, when he was but 
twelve years old, that he was already entered into the 
great questions of the doctors, and was so profoundly 
taken by their high discussions overheard in the 
temple, that he must needs have a part in them 
himself, asking questions of his own. All which he 
did, with so little appearance of pertness, and such 
wonderful beauty of manner, as well as in a tone so 
nearly divine, that they could only be “astonished by 
his understanding and answers.” And there next day 


—_ ~~ 


16 MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 


he was found by Joseph and Mary, when he should 
have been a whole day’s journey on his way back with 
them to Galilee. They remonstrate with him only in 

the gentlest and most nearly reverent manner, and : 
have nothing more to say, when he answers—‘ How 
is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be 
about my Father’s business?” Whether he had some- 
how gotten hold of the fact that he had another father 
who was not Joseph, or had simply grown out into the 
mysterious feeling of some life-business, under God’s 
spiritual Fatherhood, we do not know. But the dear 
dumb mother had been learning, all these years, to 
have her conceptions of him outrun by his own merely 
childish conceptions of himself, and what could she 
say? He probably sometimes violated her religious 
notions, by such liberties of sentiment that she was. 
disturbed. And yet her very disturbance ran up into 
summits of reverence to his worth and beauty so high 
above mere childhood, that she dared not boast of him 
and could not do better than bow her spirit and be 
still. ‘‘But his mother kept all these sayings in her 
heart ”—not the single saying just recited observe, but 
all the like sayings of his wonderful childhood. Ob- 
serve also that she did not keep them in her memory, 
or her understanding, or her diary, but in her heart— 
that well of silence in the bosom of true motherhood, 
where all freshest, purest waters are kept fresh and 
pure. Infiltered these and stored by loving thought, 
they are not vaporized and shallowed by much talk, 
and seem to be only the sweeter the deeper fill they 


MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 17 


make. Her family story she can not carry into the 
street, or even speak of with her friends. And things 
are occurring with her Jesus every day, in which the 
stamps and signatures of his divinity are distinctly 
and eyen visibly manifested, but which can not be ad- 
vertised without becoming tokens of weakness in the 
mother and precocity in the child. She sometimes 
wants to even strike a song of triumph, like Miriam 
coming up out of the sea, but her loudest, most accord- 
ant song will be silence—a hymn that she keeps hid 
in her heart, as she does all the sayings and great acts 
of her wonderful son. 

Possibly some may be harshly enough tempered, to 
hint the suspicion, that her silence, after all, is but the 
natural token of her impotence and want of character. 
She keeps still, at all points in the story, it may be 
thought, because she has nothing to say, and is in fact 
a person too unpositive and too drearily thin-minded 
to be affirmatively capable of any thing. If so it is 
most remarkable that in her beautiful one hymn, “ My 
soul doth magnify the Lord,” she displays the full 
timber of an orchestra, sailing out in exultations high 
and strong, boasting in God’s arm that has scattered 
the proud and their vain imaginations, swelling in 
great sentiments that are possible only to some grand 
patriot father, some hero of God’s cause and kingdom. 
After such high force displayed, is it by the poverty 
of her nature that she is silent? Besides, we have 
another token of her talent that is not less convincing. 
There was a very delicate question to be settled be 

2* 


18 MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS 


tween her and Joseph, before the marriage could be 
consummated. And the wonder is that she could hold 
him still to confidence, by any utmost power of mortal 
address. A weak woman would have quite talked 
down her evidence, torn it even to shreds by her pro- 
testations, washed it clean away by her tears. But 
she stood firmly instead and composedly by her 
integrity, and bore her sweet innocence in a way of 
self-affirming truth so manifestly evened by the con- 
sciousness it gave, that neither she was flurried in her 
modesty, nor he by his misgiving. It is true that 
Joseph was instructed in the matter by a dream. But 
how difficult a thing, in such a case, to authenticate 
the dream—as we see that Mary was in fact able. 
For the angel of the Lord, coming to a man by a 
dream, is but a feeble witness, compared with the 
angel of innocence and truth, in a woman, who has 
visibly felt no shadow upon her, but the overshadow 
of the Highest. It may be that some other woman 
has existed since the world began, who, even innocent, 
could bear herself successfully through an ordeal like 
this, but of that we may very well doubt! 

Besides we must not omit to notice the wise, deep 
gravity of this woman in the matter of her silence 
itself. Self-retention is the almost infallible token of 
a considerately deep, strong character. Weakness 
runs never to this, but always to unthinking clack and 
rattle. No great life, like the life of Jesus, begins at 
such a motherhood. Good sense and a closely con- 
siderate silence are its necessary conditions. Had 


_ 


| 


MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 19 


Christ’s mother been a forward and loud woman, ad- 
vertising always her miraculous child, reporting his 
strangely phenomenal acts, repeating his speeches and 
telling what great expectations she had of him, it 
really seems that she might have quite spoiled his 
Messiahship. At any rate he must have undertaken 
his ministry at an immense and almost fatal disad- 
vantage. Just as any most nobly endowed son, will 
scarcely be great, or make any but a partly absurd fig- 
ure in his endeavors to be, who is thrust on greatness 
by a noisy and ambitiously prognosticating mother. 
Accepting these terms of wise repression, her mother- 
ly great sense and piety are kept busy by the questions 


of the child, requiring to be shown how the Heavenly 


Father feedeth men and birds alike: what the very lit- 
tle leaven does in going through her whole three-meas- 
ure baking of bread; why her patching economy forbids 
putting new cloth into old garments; how the tiny mus- 
tard-seed grows large; why an old penny looks so fresh 
that has been found by sweeping out all the litter of the 
cabin ; whether the lordly house over opposite, under- 
mined and pitched headlong, by the terrible water- 
spout poured down the trough of the hills, had not been 
much better founded on arock? So the glorious child, 
seizing common things by their inmost sense, is get- 
ting packed full of parable for his great teaching day. 


He is now a man thirty years old, when the report 
arrives of John’s preaching down by the Jordan. Hast- 
ing down at once to hear him, and approaching to be 


20 MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 


baptized, he is saluted by him strangely, on sight, in the 
crowd— Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away 
the sin of the world!” The consecrating dove de- 
scends upon him, and he is sealed for his call by a word 
of sanction from above—‘ This is my beloved Son,-in 
whom I am well pleased.” He is verily come now into 
his Father’s business. Yes, he isto be Messiah! and the 
discovery breaks upon his mind like a storm upon the 
sea. By which Spirit-storm he is hurried off into the 
wilderness, to consider and get his bosom throes 
quieted and his thoughts in train for the great strange 
future before him. For this and nothing else was the 
significance, the devil, we may say, of what is called 
his temptation. And when this is ended, when his 
mind has gotten itself composed and adjusted, he goes 
back to Nazareth. The same that he was, he still is, 
yet how completely changed by his call, and the new 
great life he is now to begin! He is graduated forever 
as the Son of Mary, but nowise graduated as in love; 
for that he will never be. He finds her not at home, 
but away at the little village of Cana, back among the 
hills, where she is gone to attend the festivities of a 
wedding, at the house of a relative. Receiving an in- 
vitation that was left for him he goes up to the wed- 
ding himself. And there we are let into a new 
chapter, at the very hinge of his public life, and the 
new relation he is to have to his mother. The general 
impression is that he breaks off from her in a sense, at 
this earliest moment, reprimanding her with a good 


MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 21 


deal of severity, for what he considers to be her for- 
wardness and officious meddling. 

The wine of the feast gave out, as it would seem; 
whereupon tle mother tells him, “they have no 
wine ;” as if expecting of him just the miracle he is 
going to perform. At which Jesus turns upon her 
sharply, saying, “ Woman, what have I to do with 
thee? my hour is not yet come.” She pays, we notice, 
no attention to his rebuke, as she certainly would if 
she had felt the severity we do in it, but goes aside to 
the servants telling them to wait his orders and do 
whatever he bids them. She has no idea what that 
will be; but she evidently hopes that he will somehow 
make up the deficiency and permit them to go on with 
the distribution. 

Now the first thing to be said of this supposed rep- 
rimand is that the salutation, “ Woman,” sounding 
harsh and hard in English and very nearly insolent, 
will be quite delivered of its harshness by just observ- 
ing that no such bluffness of meaning is implied in the 
Greek, but that it is a form of address constantly used 
in salutations altogether affectionate. We have a case 
exactly in point, where Christ himself addresses his 
mother from his cross in this very salutation—“ Wo- 
man, behold thy son.” But the words that follow— 
“What have I to do with thee,” have just as little of 
reprimand possibly ; for they are words capable of all 
varieties and shades of temperament in the Greek 
idiom, the most harshly blunt and the most tenderly 
cordial; while in English they are nothing but a blow 


22 MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 


in the face. The Greek words, literally given, are 
simply—‘‘ What is there to me and to thee?” the 
words “to do” being stuck in to make up the English 
idiom. And the question, ‘‘ What is there to me and 
to thee”—what concern that is common—may mean 
either “do not put this matter in my way,” “do not 
push me with untimely suggestions ;” or it may mean, 
harshly spoken, “let me alone ;” “I will have no part 
with you.” Taking the softer sense of the words, and 
adding the clause which follows, the Saviour only 
says, “let this matter, woman, be for me, I can not 
begin now—my hour is not yet come.” But his hour 
had come nevertheless, even the hour of doing his 
first miracle, as we straightway see. And the remark- 
able thing about the speech, in which he is so com- 
monly thought to be hard in rebuke upon his mother, 
is that it signifies nothing of the kind, but is only 
what he lets out in the recoil of his feeling, at the 
moment, and is passed away the next moment, as a 
cloud passes off the sun. ‘ The beginning of miracles 
to be made even here—verily I can not begin! How 
can I launch myself on this Messiahship? This awful 
world-burden, how can I take it up?” And yet he 
took it up! and the dreaded break of his beginning 
is just here made! 
The assumption that Mary has somehow come into 
his secret plan about the wine, and is letting it out 
here by a kind of untimely and officious meddling that 
displeases him, is unpardonably coarse and heedless. 
She lets out nothing, she does not bolt upon the 


MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 23 


guests in the announcement that “the wine is out!” 
but she simply says to Jesus, privately and apart, 
“they have no wine.” And then his reply to her is 
also private of course. Neither are they low enough 
in their manners, to violate a wedding scene by any 
such indecent behavior as the open altercation here as- 
cribed to them, by many commentators, would certainly 
exhibit. Besides, if Mary had any quality honorable 
above all others, it was in the closeness of her pru- 
dence, and the title she got to the confidence of her 
son, by keeping all he said and showed of his advanc- 
ing story treasured in her heart. Keeping him shel- 
tered in this beautiful confidence, she had a largely 
open state with him for her dear reward. 

And yet we can see from the cast of this dialogue 
and story that something had transpired, giving it the 
turn it discovers in the matter of the wine. Perhaps 
we can not tell what, but we are at liberty to imagine 
any thing most convenient. Thus when Christ came 
up from the Jordan, after his probably two or three 
months absence—after the baptism, after the call, 
after the temptation—his mother, we will say, ob- 
served a remarkable change in his appearance. He 
seemed like one borne heavily down, by some un- . ™» 
known burden. When they were apart by them- i 
selves, she probably enough expostulated with him; 
whereupon he told her exactly what was come upon 
him; viz., to be himself the Messiah of the prophets! >” 
Which again led them to go over, in their conversa- ~~ 
tion, what the prophet Messiah is to do and to be—all 


et 


24 MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 


the ministries he is to perform for the poor, the sick, 
the broken-hearted, and the oppressed, all that he is to 
suffer, as the Lamb of God in the taking away of 
transgression, according to Isaiah’s recital in his fifty- 
third chapter, and according to John’s staple idea, 
just now given, in his salutation at the baptism; so to 
set up the Kingdom of God among men and call the 
Gentiles into it, as the saving grace of God for all 
mankind. Most natural it was, in this recapitulation, 
to strike on that beautiful call of Messiah, when his 
work is done, “ Ho every one that thirsteth, come ye 
to the waters, and he that hath no money come ye, 
buy and eat, yea come, buy wine and milk without 
money and without price.” Why this, said Mary— 
this wine—is festivity, and you must not have your 
heart oppressed by a mission so glad. This free-gift 
wine makes a wedding-day of your Messiahship, and 
what are we here for, but to see the beginning of it? 
So they talked the night away, it may be, and why 
shall we not see, in the frequent recurrence of this 
image of the wedding, in the Saviour’s parables after- 
wards, how deep an impression the prophet’s wedding 
call had made upon him. And to-morrow it will come 
out, in the miracle of the wine, that Jesus and his 
mother had been somehow, or in some such way, ap- 
proaching a point of expectation here. We do at 
least discover how little reason there may have been 
for the reprimand of Mary by her son, in the matter 
of the miracle; how innocent she was in the liberty 
she took, and how little thought he may have had of 


MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 25 


any reprimand at all. There is no reprimand, save 
under the English idiom. 


Let us look a moment now at the home basis Mary 
has provided for Jesus, in the prosecution of his min- 
istry. She has, besides him, four sons, and probably 
three daughters. It has been long debated, whether 
these are Mary’s own children or only cousins taken 
by adoption, or possibly children of Joseph by a for- 
mer marriage. I will not undertake the question. 
Let it be enough that these children ought to be 
Mary’s, to complete the incarnation itself. or if she 
must needs live and die in churchly virginity, lest she 
bring a taint on her divine motherhood by maternity 
in wedlock afterward, her incarnation office even puts 
dishonor on both wedlock and maternity together. Or 
if she must save her son from being own brother to 
any body by his incarnation, what genuine significance 
is there in the fact? The debate is visibly instigated 
by some ascetic, over-dainty scruple, as regards the 
true honors of marriage and a mortal blood-relation. 

The ministry of Jesus shortly brings him round to 
Nazareth, where he is set upon, at his preaching, by 
the fanatical rage of his townsmen, and compelled to - 
flee for his life. Mary can not give him up to the lot 
of a wanderer, but hastens after him down to Caper- 
naum, where the whole family are soon established in 
housekeeping for his sake. Probably they had a very 
little property, else why did Mary and Joseph go up 
to Bethlehem for the taxing? The four brothers too 

8 


26 MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 


appear to be now earning a support for the family. 
Still, having no purse when out in his ministry, Christ 
can only throw himself on the public hospitality. But 
when he comes back to Capernaum, as he is doing 
every few days, it is pleasant to know that some of the 
more frugal comforts are allowed him at his mother’s 
house, and that there, at least, he can find where to 
lay his head and be a son at home. 

But we ask to sée the inside picture of this home. 
There was never on earth a family composed of mate- 
rial more diverse in the assortment. There are two 
heads in it circled with a halo, and seven that are not; 
one is the Sacred Child or- Man, the other a Woman 
made sacred by his miraculous sonship. As regards 
the seven, there is evidence that one of them at least, 
*“‘ James the Lord’s brother,” had a large fund of pow- 
er in his gifts. After the martyrdom of James the 
apostle, he won the apostleship by his personal merit 
and force of character, and presided wisely and well, 
in a most difficult time, over the great metropolitan 
church at Jerusalem. There was vigor enough doubt- 
less in the four unsainted sons, to maintain them at 
cross-purposes always with their elder sinless brother. 
But Mary was happily prepared for the molding of 
these ill-related elements, by the fact that her mother- 
hood feeling to Jesus was unlike that of any mere nat- 
ural mother to her child. She bent over her Holy 


Thing with religious awe and not in mere fondness. 


Her love worshiped, as it were, with the Magi, when 
they came with their gifts. And her silent, almost 


MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 27 


reverent respect towards Jesus, connected with no 
manner of partiality, put him always in their respect, 
and made him a kind of benignant presence among 
them. 

Of course they had their human thoughts about 
him, such as were not always just or wise. Perhaps 
they were a little tried, or put on some hard speeches, 
by his. dropping out of work, and throwing over the 
eare of the family on them—as if he had found some- 
thing better to do about the country than the duties 
of the eldest son at home! And yet he was their won- 
derful, strange brother, held in constant respect and, 
to tell the truth, in real admiration. Thus we have a 
scene given us and a dialogue, that, if we may judge, 
passes inside of the house, and shows all the brothers 
together. The great feast of tabernacles is about com- 
ing off, at Jerusalem, and the brothers going up—for 

they are all so far religious—urge it specially on 
Jesus to put himself forward now in his impressive 
demonstrations ; so to let the public men of the nation 
see what is in him. For if he is perchance the Great 
King, Messiah, what may he not possibly do for their 
advancement! Their argument is— For no man who 
has merit keeps it secret, but seeks to be known open- 
ly, and shows himself to the world.” And the evan- 
gelist adds—“ For neither did his brethren believe in 
him.” He does not mean that they are spiritual rejec- 
tors, in that sense unbelievers; for that is an idea not 
yet born. They are willing enough plainly to be- 
lieve, but he is a riddle to every body, the Mes- 


28 MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 


siahship itself is a riddle, and even John the prophet 
reels incontinently out of his faith. In their oyer- 
politic advice there is no ill nature. They even count 
on going up to the feast in company with him, 
hoping there to witness some great success, that 
will justify their admiration and mightily bring 
on the family. James, the future apostle, has 
been practicing in this prudentially contriving way 
from his childhood onward, as he will yet again 
show at the great council at Jerusalem; and if 
Jesus had been a debating character, policy and prin- 
ciple—the two worlds represented in the house—would 
have been crepitating always in their two kinds of 
electricity. But his way no doubt has been always, to 
hold the dialogue of the house a little way off, and 
save it thus from becoming a wrangle. So we see him 
contriving here—repelled and hurt as he is by their 
counsel—to set his clever brothers off on their religious 
journey, without him. How can he go up with them, 
thinking all the way, as reminded by their presence he 
must, of the high figure he is now expected to make! 
In this glance at the mother’s family we see them 
all engaged for him and with him, and if they do not 
believe in him, they will stick fast by him, we can see, 
in dearest and most faithful love. As she actually did, 
following him to the cross and staying unflinchingly 
by him in his awful hour; and as she and they togeth- 
er also did, still holding on upon -his unknown future, 
after his horrible death had blasted seemingly all fur- 
ther hope in it; gathering in with his apostles, to wait 


MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 29 


with them the coming of his unknown promise—they 
alone to be specially named in the roll of the little 
apostolic assembly, “ Mary the mother of Jesus and his 
brethren” —conspicuously honored in that record as the 
head family thus of the kingdom. 

How absurd now is the discovery, put forward 
by critics who are willing to let down the person- 
al honors of Mary by setting a stigma on her char- 
acter, that about this time she joins the church 
party against him, and heads a kind of family 
conspiracy to get him under constraint. Christ 
has been pressed all day by multitudes in and about 
Capernaum, teaching them in successions of parable, 
and healing their plagues, and has not even found 
time to so much as eat bread. And now, at last, 
word comes to Mary, that he has been cornered and 
rushed into a court, where he is completely hedged in 
by the multitude or mob, raging madly against him. 
The family hasten thither, greatly concerned for him, 
and what is specially uncomfortable, fearing that he is 
finally getting quite beside himself; for his extraordin- 
ary sentiments and strangely unconventional utterances, 
exceeding even the eccentricities of genius, have been 
keeping them always in this kind of disturbance, till 
now they are quite unwontedly concerned lest he is 
becoming lunatic; a fear that is increased by the 
charges of foul possession, that are being debated by 
the multitudes inside of the house. Now the repre- 
sentation is, that his family are come down to the place 

3* 


30 MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 


“to lay hold of him ;” but what are we to understand 
by that? They are certainly not absurd enough to think 
of seizing him by violence in that crowd, or we ab- 
surd enough to impute any such design. The natural 
and proper conception is that they are come to bring 
him off by their friendly remonstrances, or half-com- 
pelling importunities, requiring him, as it were, to go 
home with them and rest, and take his necessary food. 
They send in word accordingly, that his mother and 
family are without, desiring to speak with him. Per- 
ceiving at once the over-tender concern that has 
brought them hither, instead of going instantly-forth 
at their call, he finds opportunity in it to say to the 
multitude about him, that he is here among men, as 
in a large and most dear family. And who is my 
mother, and who are my brethren, but you all here 
present, who can do the will of God? “ for whosoever 
shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and 
sister, and mother ”—such and so great is the dear blood 
affinity with mankind, into which he is born. The 
whole significance and beauty of the appeal is, from 
family affection to the broader affection of God’s uni- 
versal family. There is nothing to be blamed in what 
Mary is here doing, and Christ blames nothing. To 
say that she is here with her family posse to seize and 

drag away, is a libel too absurd. Besides, it is a most 
sorry detraction from all dignity of sentiment in the 
lesson Christ is giving here, to imagine that he draws 
it from his displeased feeling; saying thus—* I drop 
these faithless relatives, and turn to you, hoping te 


MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 31 


at least make brothers of you, since these desert and be- 
tray me.” The impeachment is too sharp, to allow any 
look of attraction, in the universal-brotherhood relation 
thus severely commended. A family quarrel stands in 
winning connection with nothing so grandly fraternal. 


Vane behavior at the cross fitly ends her story. 
On the way out a great company of people follow, 
comprising many women who go to bewail him, and 
make up the procession of mourners. Mary, the 
mother, was deep enough in mourning, but she could 
not join that noisy company, and it does not appear 
that the other two Marys, Magdalene and the wife of 
Cleopas, were in it. . At first, when the cross is set up, 
and the suspension made, they are with the mother at 
the cross. But we shortly find them in a larger circle 
of women, looking on from a point farther off; having 
floated away thither unconsciously, perhaps, in the 
swing of the crowd. Mary, the mother, is thus left 
alone, waiting there by the cross during all those 
dreadful hours, till Jesus dies. And observe she 
“stood,” a word of strong composure. Her knees 
do not give way. She does not faint, or fall on her 
face. She does not toss her arms in shrieks and wild 
hysteric wailings; not allowing herself, when a scene 
so transcendent is passing, to make a scene of her own 
private griefs. Doubtless she remembers the word of 
Simeon, that went before upon her, when he said— 
“ Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul 
also,” but there she stands, in the beloved disciple’s 


32 MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 


company, holding fast the decencies of sorrow, as if 
the proprieties of the worlds were upon her! At 
length, when life is ebbing to the close, Jesus says to 
| her, in the undertone, probably, of his failing voice, 
“Woman, behold thy son !” to him also, “ Behold thy 
mother!’ Under this last will and testament, she 
goes out silent with John, who takes her to his home. 
Why Jesus committed her thus to John and not to the 
four brothers, it is not difficult to guess; for John has 
a home as they certainly have not, and are not likely 
soon to have again. For the dreadful ignominy fall- 
ing on the house in his death, he sees must utterly 
crush out and scatter the family. However, the ex- 
pression “from that hour that disciple took her to his 
own home,” is sufficiently justified, without under- 
standing that she remained with him till she died, or 
longer than till her return back to Galilee. Besides 
it is to be noted too, that she and the four brothers are 
actually gathered family-wise, in the ante-pentecostal 
assembly. Where, no doubt, they all had their minds 
opened, under Peter’s sermon, to the full discovery of 
what their Jesus had come into the world to do. And 
the scene was a kind of new birth to them all, putting 
them in courage again, and bringing them friends to 
help them by the ministration of abundant means, and 
a wonderful, unheard-of sympathy. 

How long after this she lived we do not know. But 
we could most easily believe that when her mind was 
opened at the pentecost, to the meaning of her son’s 
great mission, she was at once so astounded and exalted 


MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 33 


by the awful height of her relationship, that her sou] 
took wing in the uplift of her felt affinity with the High- 
est, and was gone! But we have no such traditions. 
Possibly the suspicion that some were like to give 
her annoyance by the tender of divine honors, 
put her on ways of withdrawment and silence. The 
remarkable thing is that John has nothing to say of 
her, or to report from her—except, probably, the story 
of Cana ; for the conversation of that story being pri- 
vate between her and her son, could have been reported 
only by her, and is given by John alone of all the 
evangelists. If John had her with him even for 
years, speaking freely of what she knew, how many 
things could she have told him that we so much long 
to hear—the story of the nativity, at first hand, from 
her human point of view, in its due connection with 
her prayers; all the memorabilia of the wonderful 
childhood ; all about the mind-growth and develop- 
ment of the child, or his advancing genius in the mat- 
ter of character. And yet the apostle, beginning his 
gospel far back in the solemn arcana of the Eternal 
Word, and passing directly over Mary to speak, four- 
teen verses after, of “the Word made flesh,” gives 
not so much as a trace of mention, concerning her 
maternal place and office in the story. Making ne 
report of her conversations, he is equally silent as 
regards her death; telling never when she died, or 
how she died, or in what place she was buried. And 
it is well; for there was even a much higher necessity 
in her case, than in that of Moses, that her burial- 


34 MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 


place should be hidden from mortal knowledge. 
Otherwise it would be the center of a vaster idolatry 
than the world has ever known. The divine wisdom, 
too, as I think, somehow took her aside, with a set 
purpose not to let her mix her human-story products, 
beautiful and graceful as they were, with Christ’s im- 
mortal life-word from above. About all we can say 
of her, therefore, under her embargo of silence, is 
that she appears until she disappears; which she does 
—most wonderful, most nearly divine of all human 
characters—in the stillness of a snow-flake falling into 
the sea. 


But her disappearing from us does not bring her 
story to an end; it only prepares our final appearing 
to her, on a higher plane of life, where she will most 
assuredly be the center of a higher feeling than some 
of us may have imagined. Our pitiful mistraining 
here is assuredly there to be corrected, as an all but — 
mortal impropriety. And when that correction is 
made, such flavors of beauty, and sweetness, and true 
filial reverence will be shed abroad, I can easily be- 
lieve, in such loving and blessed diffusion, as will even 
recast for us Protestants at least, the type and tem- 
perament of the heavenly feeling itself. The true 
relativity of motherhood gets no place in us here, 
because we are in a prejudice that extirpates right 
perception ; recoiling even from her person, as if that 
were somehow to blame for the dismal idolatries pros- 
trate before it, and the mock-worship gathered in it to 


MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. —_ 85 


her shrine. Probably there was never any created 
being of all the created worlds, put in such honor as 
this woman, chosen to be the Lord’s mother; all the 
more truly our mother, that, from her begins the new 
born human race.— Hail, thou highly favored.” 
“Blessed art thou among women !” 

To, her it is given, even to grow the germ-life of 
the Divine Man, Son of the Father, in its spring. 
And her behavior is beautiful enough to even meet an 
oceasion so high. That grace of bearing, that sweet, 
devout modesty, such as became the motherhood of 
everlasting innocence; that watching of her miracu- 
lous boy, that could so easily be telling his wonders 
with a weak mother’s fondness in the street, but 
which still she was treasuring in her heart; that 
wondrous propriety of silence at the cross, allowing 
her no wail of outcry in that hour, lest she might 
be making herself a part of the scene—O ye lilies 
and other white harbingers of spring, culled so often 
by art to be symbols of her unspotted motherhood, 
what can ye show of silent flowering in the white of 
purity, which she does not much better show herself! 

We seem just now, in these modern centuries of 
Reformation, to be assuming that Mary is gone by, 
and the honors paid her ended; and if we choose to 
let our hearts be barbarized in the coarse, unappre- 
ciating prejudices that have been, so far, our bitter 
element, there certainly are finer molded ages to come. 
Is it too soon even now to admit some feeling of ration- 
al shame, that we have been weak enough to let our 


36 MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 


eyes be so long plastered with this clay? Doubtless it 
must be the first thing with us, after we have entered 
the great world before us, to get cleared, and assured, 
and at home in our relations to the Son of Man him- 
self. After that our next thing, as I think, will be 
to know our mother, the mother of Jesus; for no 
other of the kingdom, save the King himself, has a 
name that signifies more. And I make no question 
that, when the great hierarchs and princes of other 
worlds and ages, who are challenged to pay their Ho- 
sannas in the Highest, throng in to meet us, they will 
ask, first of all, for the woman by whom, under God’s 
quickening overshadow, Christ, the Eternal Son of 
God, obtained his life-connection with the race, and 
his birth into practical brotherhood with it. As the 
Sages of the east, guided by the star, brought their 
tribute to the child at her stall, so these ancients of 
God will come in with us, wanting above all to know 
the woman herself, at whose royal motherhood and by . 
it, Immanuel, the King, broke into the world, and set 
up his kingdom. And higher still is she raised by the 
recognition of her son himself; for as she is yearning 
always fondly after him, so will he never disallow his 
old-time filial feeling towards her. Owning her never 
as in any sense the Mother of God, he has yet a moth- 
er-sense in him, that will be an Everlasting Sentiment, 
and apart from all idolatrous honors paid her by men, 
will clothe her with such honors really divine, as fitly 
crown the part she bore in his wonderful story. 


IT. 
LOVING GOD IS BUT LETTING GOD LOVE US. 


“ And we have known and believed the love that God hath te 
us."—John 1: 4, 16. 


By this if is, in other words, that we are different 
from what we were; and our thanksgiving is, that 
the love of God has found us, and begotten its like in 
our before unloving nature. It is not that we have 
volunteered loving towards God, bringing on the 
love ourselves, but that he is beforehand with us, 
and that, simply knowing and believing the love God 
hath to us, we so let in, or give welcome to it, that we 
have it reproduced in ourselves. Discoursing in a 
similar strain, in the previous verses of the chapter, 
the apostle declares our part in this change more 
negatively, but to the same effect. ‘“ Not that we 
loved God, but that he loved us.” Also, “ God is 
love—fountain, flood, and sea—and he that dwelleth 
in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.” So that 
being immersed in God’s love, we are saturated with 
it, even as our garments would be with water. We 
do not exactly take it by absorption, it is true, we 
give it space. We let God love us into love, which 
itself suffices, and carries all grace with it. 

4 (37) 


388 LOVING GOD IS BUT 


I propose then, for the present occasion, a truth 
which ought to be received most hopefully and ten- 
derly by you all, and will be received with a specially 
eager delight, by any one who is struggling heavily 
with the burden of his sins, and does not find the way 
to cast them off. It is this—That loving God is but 
letting God love us—giving welcome, that ts to God's love, 
knowing and believing the love God hath to us. 

A very different impression prevails with many— 
sometimes with disciples themselves, but more gen- 
erally with such as have come into no Christian ex- 
perience. They suppose that something very great, 
and difficult, and almost impossible, is required to be 
done. Perhaps they have in mind the Scripture call, 
commanding them to strive as if they had a narrow 
gate to pass, to cut off right hands, to pluck out right 
eyes, to sell all, to forsake houses and lands, and even 
to give up life itself, How then can it be, they will 
ask, with such representations before us, that we have 
nothing more to do for the new love’s sake—that 
which brings salvation—than to just let God love us? 
But they will have their answer by only observing 
how these throes, these seeming violences of self- 
renunciation are all in the way of giving room and 
welcome to God’s love; because they are needed to 
clear away the barricades and obstructions by which 
we are always and habitually, though, perhaps, not 
consciously, fencing the love of God away. In one 
view this simply letting God love us appears to be a 
very slight and facile matter, a; indeed it should be, 


LETTING GOD LOVE US. 39 


but we have a way of making it fearfully difficult 
when it is not in itself and should not be. The dif 
ficulty is artificial, created wholly by the recoil of our 
own guiltiness. It is the lie we are in, which can not 
bear the truth. This will appear more fully as we go 
on to unfold the proposition stated. 

1. I make it a point distinctly asserted that all men 
living in sin repel or draw back from the love of 
God, and will not let it come in upon them. It 
seems impossible that a truth so glorious for man, so 
grandly luminous, one that raises him so high, as that 
God, the infinite Father loves him, loves the world 
that is made for him, flames all round the sky as a 
circle of day by his love—it seems impossible, I say, 
that such and so great a truth will not be accepted 
by a creature it makes so great. Yetsoitis. Ido 
not mean by this that we undertake to stop God’s 
love, or actually command it away, but only that we 
ignore it, let it come on our back and not into our 
face or heart. We do not say “Go thy way,” but 
we go our own way, and that means just the same 
thing. When we are required to love God, we con- 
sciously enough reject the requirement; but if it were 
given us as the really true version of it, that we are 
simply required to let God love us, we probably 
should not be conscious of any withstanding, or un- 
letting hindrance, and yet we do withstand by a re- 
sistance so subtle that we scarcely know it, so in. 
tractable as to be fatally sure. 

And the solution of the matter is, that we instinct 


40 LOVING GOD IS BUT 


ively recoil and can not give the true God-welcome 
to God’s love, not being at all in affinity with it. We 
see the same thing in our relations to one another. 
We never really consent to be loved by another whose 
ways, manners, character, are any way distasteful. 
Every affection we can not reciprocate creates a 
degree of revulsion in our feeling. If we are averted 
from another by our own fault, to know that he loves 
us makes us for the time still more averse. And 
thus it is, how often, that God is only too good and 
pure and high, to be any but a visitor—unwelcome; 
because he wakens guilt and self-disgust, and is felt as 
a disturber even in his love, more than as a friend. 
As to letting in his love upon us, we do not want it, 
we desire not the knowledge of his ways. 
Conceive the instance of a son who has fallen into 
ways of vice and profligacy. The sad thing of his 
condition is, that he does not like so much of the 
parental love, engaged in ways so many, and tender, 
and deep in sacrifice, to win him back to virtue. All 
such love comes to him as in qualms, and the very 
words, and promises, and tears, that should be elo- 
quent, only raise a stifling smoke in his feeling, even 
as if they were but fumes of sulphur falling on hot 
plates of iron. Doubtless there is much goodness in 
the good father and mother, but the goodness offends 
him, and he will not let it be the appeal it should, 
because he is so possessed by his vices, as to have no 
affinity for it. And yet he can, or probably will have 
such affinity when his spells are broken. When the 


LETTING GOD LOVE US. 4] 


bitter woes of his vices, his lot of shame, his want, 
his all-devouring appetite, bring his infatuations to a 
full end, as they may, and turn him back in sad _ re- 
lentings on the love he could not accept, you shall 
hear him bless himself in it, saying, “ O it is all that 
is left me, I can not deserve it, I can never be worthy 
of it, or fitly return it. All that I can do is just to 
let it bathe me in my shame and hopelessness.” His 
recoils are ended now, because the spells that were 
on him are all broken. Able now to say “I am no 
more worthy to be called thy son,” the tendernesses 
that before seemed over-fond or foolish, melt a way 
through his memory, and the letting in of the old, 
once rejected love becomes a new, profoundly filial 
love in his bosom. Just so it is with all bad minds in 
their relation to the love of God. They recoil and 
close up against it. Doubtless it is good in God to be 
tendering himself in such love, and a certain sensi- 
bility is moved by it, still there is a revulsion felt, 
and no fit answer of returning love is made; where, 
as we can see, the true account of the matter is, that 
the love is unwelcome, because there is no want of it, 
or consentingness of mind towards it; which is the 
same as to say, that the man does not let God love 
him. That love would be photographed in him by 
an answering love, but he offers only his back to it. 
As if the artist at his camera were to put in nothing 
but a plate of glass, prepared by no chemical sus- 
ceptibility, saying to the light, “shine on if you will, 
and make what picture you can.” He really does not 
4% 


49, LOVING GOD IS BUT 


let the light make any she aed at all, but even disal 
lows the opportunity. 

2. We shall be farther advanced in our understand- 
ing of this matter, if we observe how constantly the 
scripture word looks te the love of God, for the in- 
generation of love in men, and so for their salvation. 
The radical, every where present idea is, that the 
new love wanting in them is to be itself only a reveal- 
ment of the love of God to them, or upon them. 
Thus the new-born life is to be “the love of God, 
shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Ghost ;” where 
we can not understand by the love of God, the dis- 
ciples’ love to God—that would be a salvation quite 
one side of the gospel plan, which proposes the un- 
bosoming of God’s love to man, that it may be shed 
abroad in him by the Holy Ghost, and become 
a salvation, as it begets, by the Spirit, an answering 
love. So again when it is declared that “ Love is 
of God, for every one that loveth is born of God ;” 
the meaning is not that God’s love is of God, but 
that ours is of God—the love, that is, of every one 
that loveth. It is not a love created in us by some 
fiat of power, but a love begotten or born in us. 
So that when it is born, we are to say, “our love 
is of God,” or more exactly still, “our love is of the 
love of God, a ray of the divine, kindling its warmth 
in us.” So again, yet more expressly, the new spirit 
of love to our fellow man is ascribed to the love of 
God in us—“ If we love one another, God dwelleth 
in us, and his love is perfected in us.” To the same 


LETTING GOD LOVE US. 43 


effect again is the word of our apostle— We love him 
because he first loved us.” Our love is nothing, it is 
God who appears in his Son, declaring—* For God 
so loved the world;” and what we call our love is 
nothing but the warmth of that. Hence, too, the 
incarnation itself. It incarnates the love of God to 
melt a way into our love. “Hereby perceive we the 
love of God—” “In this was manifested the love of 
God toward us.” The plan is to beget love by love, 
and nothing is left us to do in the matter, but simply 
to allow the love, and offer ourselves to it. There is 
no conception any where, that we are to make a new 
love ourselves ; we have only to let the love of God 
be upon us, and have its immortal working in us. 
That will transform, that will new-create, in that we 
shall live. Consider again— 

3. What tremendous powers of motion and.com- 
motion, what dissolving, recomposing forces come 
upon, or into a soul, when it suffers the love of God. 
For it is such kind of love as ought to create, and 
must, a deep, all-revolutionizing ferment, in the moral 
nature. It is no mere natural love, such as the love 
of kind, or parentage; no friendship love, no love of 
merit, no merely approving love; but it is a thing 
how different, a disapproving, condemning, sorrowing, 
often a suffering, and in all the great Christ-story, a 
much abhorring, morally offended love. And here is 
the reason why we can not let it be upon us, or have 
its dear great way in us. It rakes up our bad con. 
victions, it stirs our bosom disorders, it chokes our 


44 LOVING GOD IS BUT 


remorse. And O what moral majesty is there in it, 
overtopping all we know of God beside, and casting 
its not baleful, but awfully oppressive and ominous 
shadow upon us. It melts in pity, it is tender as 
fresh rain, and yet, being so abhorrent, so deep in 
displeasure and moral offense, what will the letting of 
it in upon us, and the knowing and believing what 
it hath for us, and the true accepting of it—what 
will it do but scald, and shake, and decompose, and 
recompose every thing in us? The letting God love 
us in this manner—out of Pilate’s court, under the 
crown of thorns, out of the cross—is not assuredly the 
making up of a merely smooth salvation. Love though 
it be, it is the silent artillery of God, a salvation 
that wins by a dreadful pungency ; raising up convic- 
tion of sin, to look on him whom it hath pierced, moy- 
ing agitations deep, stirring up all mires. So that 
when the love gets welcome, it has dissolved every 
thing, and the new-born peace is the man new com- 
posed in God’s living order. Letting God love us 
with such love, is adequate remedy therefore and 
complete, and is no mere nerveless quietism, as some 
might hastily judge. Or if any doubt on this point 
may remain, I proceed— 

4. To ask what more a sinner of mankind, doing 
the utmost possible, can be expected or required to 
do. Can he tear himself away from sin by pulling 
at his own shoulder? Can he pluck himself out of 
selfishness, or eject selfishness out of himself, by an 
act of his will? Can he clarify the currents of his 


LETTING GOD LOVE US. 45 


soul by willing that his thoughts shall flow angel- 
ically? Can he, by a mere self-weeding culture, 
clean out all the tares of the mind, and make it a 
garden of beauty, when it has no germ of God’s 
planting to spring up and grow in it? Can he 
starve out his sins by fasting, or wear them out by a 
pilgrimage, or whip them out by penances, or give 
them away in alms? No! no! none of these. All 
that he can do to beget a new spirit in his fallen 
nature, we now come back to say, is to offer up him. | 
self to the love of God, and let God love him. He 
can be changed only as the ice of winter is, by letting | 
the great warm sun shine from above into its crystal 
body, not by willing in itself to assume the liquid | 
state. Or, to use a different comparison, as he can — 
see only by allowing the daylight to stream into his 
eyes, so he can expel the internal disorder and dark- 
ness of his soul, only by letting the light of God’s © 
love fall into it. Furthermore, as he can not see a | 
whit more clearly than the light enables him, by | 
straining his will into his eyes, so he can do no more | 
in the way of clearing his bad mind than to open it, | 
as perfectly as possible, to the love of God. 

Need I say again, to make this point more sure, 
that letting God love us, as we now speak, im- 
plies a great deal more than a mere negative sur- 
render to it. There is no resistance to God that is 
more absolute, or in fact more effective, than that 
which we sometimes offer in the mere vis cnertice of 
a self-indulgent, negatively resigned quietism. No, 


46 LOVING GOD IS BUT 


to let God love us means a great deal more, which I 
need not specify and could not if I would. You 
must be transparent to God, that he may shine 
through. All unrighteous practice, all ungodly habit, 
all self-worship and self-pleasing, all perverse lustings 
and envies opposite to God’s love, must be cast out, 
else the love can not have room; and, to comprehend 
every thing, your prayers must fan your desires, 
waiting as porters at all the gates and windows of 
your feeling, to hold them open to God’s day. 

And then, again, it is vain to imagine that you 
can let God’s love flow in, if you can not let it flow 
out. We must let the love we are to receive have 
free course, flowing through us, in such kind of 
works and lovings as it will naturally instigate. It 
must be allowed not only to beget itself in us, but to 
make us to others what God is to us. Hence the 
soul that is actuated or impelled by any kind of 
hatred or revenge, or that holds a grudge against 
another and can not, will not forgive him, can not 
really be said to let God love him; for God’s love to 
him is a forgiving love, that bends in blessing and 
even bleeds over all enemies. If you have it, you 


must have it in its own divine properties, admitted, - 


in them, to reign. And now it remains to say— 

5. That when we come to accurately understand 
what is meant by faith, which is the universally ac- 
cepted condition of salvation, we only give, in facty 
another version of it, when we say that the just let- 
ting God love us, amounts to precisely the same 


ee eo 


LETTING GOD LOVE US. 47 


thing. For if aman but offers himself up trustfully 
and clear of all hindrance to the love of God in 
Jesus Christ, saying, though it be in silence, “be it 
upon me; let it come and do its sweet will in me; O 
there is nothing I can so much desire as to be loved 
by God, however abhorrently and disgustfully ; 
this I will trustfully take and tenderly rest in, for 
it is all the salvation I want,”’—plainly that is but 
letting God love him, and yet what is it but faith ? 
In proposing it then as a saving condition, that we 
let God love us, we do not dispense with faith. We 
only say “believe,” with a different pronunciation. 
Indeed there is no so good way of describing faith, 
as to make it convertible at every point, into the mere 
suffering trustfully of God’s love upon us. Yes, O 
guilty one, let God love thee; yes, believe the love 
_ God hath to thee, and rest thy all eternally in it. 
Go thou to Bethlehem, and catch that hymn of wor- 
ship that rolls along mid air, and down the face of 
the mountains—“ Peace on earth, Good will to men.” 
Rise ere the day breaks, and climb the solitary peak, 
where Jesus kneels apart and look upon the bur- 
dened love of his prayer. Overhear his words of 
gentle sympathy at the grave of Mary’s dead brother, 
and note the gentler tears he drops at that grave, as 
being himself a divine brother mourning with her. 
Steal up the hillside, in the deep silence of the night, 
and watching there under the olives of the garden, 
behold the heavier night of agony that rests upon the 
loving heart of Jesus. Struggle up the street 


48 LOVING GOD IS BUT 


with him, as he goes out bearing his cross, and there 
behold the only beautiful unmarred spirit of the 
world, exhale itself in prayer and apology to God 
for its enemies—then say, “This is God—God so 
loved the world ;” adding also something yet more 
personal, dearer and closer to feeling,—‘‘ who loved 
me, and gave himself for me.” Strange then will it 
be, if you do not also love him, and are not quick- 
ened by him as by some new life loved into you; even 
as he himself was raised from the dead by the glory 
of the Father. This is your faith, neither more nor 
less; or we may call it simply your letting God love 
you, in the life and cross of his son. Be it one or the 
other, it is still the same. Enough that under this 
description or that, the love has gotten its just power 
in you, and settled its eternal indwelling in your 
hitherto unloving nature. 


I conclude, then, after so many illustrations given, 
' that loving God is no change beginning at us, but a 
coming rather of God’s love upon us; where the 
utmost we can do is to simply let him love us, and 
_ give him unobstructed, everlasting welcome. How 
then is it—for this, in fact, is one of the chief wonders 
of our trial in the matter of religion—that we en- 
counter in it so many insurmountables and impossi- 
bles ? 

Even they who have sometime seemed to take 
Christ’s yoke and find it easy, forget, how shortly after, 
the sweet ease they enjoyed, and only have the yoke 


LETTING GOD LOVE US. 49 


by itself. We find them sighing again for some more 
complete deliverance, asking by what throes and 
agonies, or by what mighty works, they may push away 
their condemnations, and come into liberty.. They 
even wrench themselves in fierce endeavors often, 
with no result attained to, but a final despairing of 
deliverance till they are delivered of life itself. It is 
even as if they were lifting in mires that give way 
and let them deeper down. Who could imagine, 
looking in upon these desperations and faintings of 
mortal courage, that after all nothing more difficult 
is required of them, than to just be in the love God 
pours upon them, and about them. This indeed is 
difficult, but only because it is so simple and easy, 
that it can not be believed. Know and believe the 
love God hath to you, and you shall have all that you 
are willing to receive, more than you can ask or even 
think. You have nothing to do but to let God’s love 
possess and fill you, which it assuredly will, even 
as it fills the great and wide sea of his infinite 
bosom. 

The reason why your sanctification, brethren, 
goes on so slowly, probably is, that you believe so 
little, endeavoring so much, it may be, in yourself. 
If you believe that God loves you little, then, of 
course, you will love little. If you believe that he 
loves you much, then you will love much, and you 
will be changed or sanctified just according to the 
measures of God’s love you receive. If you let Him 
flow in as a river, then your peace will flow as a river. 

5 


50 LOVING GOD IS BUT 


The only hard thing you have to do is to let him do 
what he will—to pour his love into you according to 
the exceeding abundance of his love. 

At the same time it is here permitted us to say, 
that such as truly seek after God have no right to 
find any one of the difficulties they so often complain 
of. They are utterly baffled, somehow, in finding the 
gate, and can not enter in; and they even quote the 
words of the Saviour when he calls it “the strait 
gate,” not observing that it is strait to them, only be- 
cause they are so narrowed down in themselves, that 
they can not believe it to be wide as it is—wide even 
as the love of God. Nothing after all is required of 
them more difficult, than to just accept and welcome 
the love of God, as set forth in his Son. There is no 
penance prescribed, there are no deficiencies to be 
made up, no mountains of righteousness to be piled 
—nothing is required but to give free course to the 
love of God, and let it have its own renewing, di- 
vinely sufficient power. 

Is there any tenderly doubting one present, groan- 
ing under the burden of his sins and the bondage of 
his evil life—what has he to do for deliverance ? 
What but to simply know and believe the love God 
hath to him? This do, and he is free. O thou sor- 
rowing, dejected, fainting bondman of sin, believe, 
believe, and thy chains are broken, thy burdens gone 
forever. The moment thou canst let God love thee, 
a new answering love kindles in thee, shed abroad 
there by the Holy Ghost. 


LETTING GOD LOVE US. 51 


And it is, accordingly, a very strange part of my 
duty here, to warn you, that a great many, who 
begin to seek after God, defeat and fatally obstruct 
their endeavor, by overdoing, unable to simply be- 
lieve and let God’s love be upon them; because that 
certainly can not be enough. Ought they not to be 
much afflicted, and suffer long and heavily under 
their convictions? Must they not put themselves 
forth in immense self-endeavor ?—must they not 
break in or out, by huge throes of will?—must they 
not repent hard and doubtfully, and take up against 
their repentances a long time, so as to be fitly com- 
mended to God by their thoroughness? Passing thus 
into their own will, to assume the charge and do the 
work of their own regeneration, they take themselves 
quite off and away from the revelation of God’s love, 
as the Spirit waits and works to reveal it, and so 
they are defeated by their excess of doing. Thou- 
sands are beaten off from God in just this way. 
Overdoing, if I should not rather say over-under- 
taking, is even one of the most common hindrances 
to salvation. No! the most that you can do is to let 
God do everything; that is to offer yourself up to 
him in a perfectly open, unobstructed state. Love 
is of God, and every one that loveth is born of 
God. 

And yet, exactly on the side opposite, there are 
some who begin to seek after God, and defeat their 
own effort by a certain expectation of what would be 
overdoing on the part of God. They expect the Holy 


oe LOVING GOD IS BUT 


Spirit to put omnipotence on them, and do the 
change they need, by an act of supreme efficiency. 
They forget that while God, in the department of 
mere things can do all that he pleases by his creative 
will and fiat, he still can do nothing in that way in | 
the matter of character. He can pile the seas on the 
mountains, and lift the mountains into the stars, or 
hurl seas, mountains, stars, all together through 
space, as he does, the light of the morning. But no 
such force-work can change the mold of a character. 
In the last degree every moral change must be 
wrought in us, through consideration, feeling, choice ; 
that is by the sense and belief of what God is in his 
love. He can do nothing over and above what he 
does by his excellence, save as by his Spirit and Proy- 
idence he prepares us to behold and be transformed by 
his excellence. To expect more of him, therefore, is 
fatal. And is not this enough? Should he over-do, 
in the way just described, he would only do less. If 
his love can not reach you, then you can not be 
reached, And if his love can not save you, then you 
can not be saved ; for salvation is character, and love 
is the power by which only it is, or ever can be, 
wrought. O the perversity, blindness, hardness— 
apart from all thought of retribution we say it—that 
can not be gained by all that God has done, or does, 
or shows, or suffers, in his Son! 

There is yet one thought standing off alone, as it 
were, that demands a right to be itself the conclusion - 
of this subject. We are always thinking, or trying 


‘ 


LETTING GOD LOVE US. 53 


to think, that we have reasons, or half justifications, 
for not accepting God and religion. God we say is 
absolute, and we have insuperable difficulties in ac- 
cepting any kind of absolutism. God again com- 
mands, and authority is not pleasant. He maintains 
a Providence over the world, and while we like to 
have the world well taken care of, there is a good deal 
in the method, which is satisfactory to nobody. God 
maintains a way of rigid and exact truth, and truth 
which admits no variation, tolerates no accommoda- 
tion, is not agreeable. He is said to be everlastingly 
just, and justice is only appalling. His character they 
say, is infinitely, spotlessly pure, and the thought of 
such purity is not altogether welcome. He requires 
repentance for all wrong, and we can not humble our- 
selves to it easily. He is patient and we do not like to 
be endured by mere patience. He is commended to 
us as a long-suffering God, which is no commendation 
to our feeling, for how can we like to be merely suf- 
fered by long-suffering? So by these many consid- 
erations, one or all, we are averted from God. And 
we half convince ourselves that we are justified in 
them, at any rate they are reasons to us, and we 
indulgently consent to let them be. But here, as now 
we see, you add another and last reason, that God is 
moving on you by his love, and you do not like to be 
loved in the style of the cross. You turn yourself 
away from this, you are offended or put in revulsion 
by it, as by all the other so called reasons that are 
more severe. It may be good enough for God to love 
5* 


54 LOVING GOD, ETC. 


you, but you can not let him find you inwardly by it. 
Ah, that in this so perversely excusing mind you are 
going in shortly, to make answer before him. And 
there bringing forth your reasons—all the long cata- 
logue just named, and especially the last—what face 
will you put upon it? Verily I can think of nothing 
so dreadful as that this bad mind, going in thither, 
is to carry in with it just what it is—able never 
hitherto to heartily welcome even the love of God. 


III. 
FEET AND WINGS. 


“When they stood they let down their wings.”—Hzekiel 1: 24. 


Iv is the distinction of all flying creatures that they 
have a double apparatus, wings for the air, and feet 
for the ground. Accordingly they draw their feet up 
under them when they fly, and when they settle on 
their feet drop their wings at their side. Thus our 
prophet, in the words here cited, puts a touch of na- 
ture on God’s cherubim, as if they, too, when they 
settle in their flight, must do it of course in a manner 
correspondent—“ When they stood they let down 
their wings.” 

He intends, of course, no specially religious lesson 
here, but the fact he cites may be used, I conceive, 
with some advantage, to illustrate a very important 
subject of Christian experience, otherwise difficult to 
be effectively presented ; also the related fact, that so 
many make up what they call a religious life, that has 
no really Christian experience in it. 


I. The subject of Christian experience, what it is, 
and how to be maintained. 
This nether element of ours, called Nature and the 


(55) 


56 FEET AND WINGS. 


world, is a kind of base-level on which we trudge, and 
drudge ourselves in our works, and take what grime 
of it we must, having faculties of locomotion, feeding, 
sensation, natural sentiment, and sense-perception, 
coupled with discursive understanding—by all which 
we act our parts on foot, as it were, and have our 
opportunity in the uses given us. Meantime, we 
have a higher range permitted us into which it is our 
privilege to ascend; with attributes of faith-percep- 
tion, love-appropriation, spiritual imagination, added, 
for the sensing of God and the taking of his revela- 
tion to live in it; in all which we become aerial crea- 
tures, so to speak, resting suspensively on things 
above the world, and ranging freely in them. And it 
is this glorious uplifting that produces the transcend- 
ent mystery of experience in Christian conversion. 
For the major, infinitely nobler part of our faculty 
is here opened out for the first time into worlds above 
the world ; even as a worm bursting its chrysalis 
begins to fly, or as a balloon, when the cords are cut, 
leaps with a bound into the sky. O, what buoyancies 
of faculty now take us, all struggling upward after 
God! So that now, becoming spirit, and no more 
flesh only, the new inspirations lift us into quite 
another range of experience. 

And the Word of Life represents this uplifting of 
souls in a great many different ways that are yet all 
concurrent. ‘Conversation in Heaven ”—“ Raised 
up together to sit together in heavenly places in 
Christ Jesus”—‘ Risen with Christ to seek those 


FEET AND WINGS. 57 


things that are above”—“Ye are come unto the 
Heavenly Jerusalem ”—‘ They shall mount up on 
wings as eagles.” The conception is that souls new- 
born “from above,” as Christ speaks, are in this man- 
ner lifted above, and go clear of the foot-levels of the 
world and the mere natural understanding. The 
smother of flesh and sense is taken off, and they 
rise. 

They were creatures of understanding and crea- 
tures in the higher capabilities of faith; but living. 
in the understanding, in that always looking down, 
they saw the coarse, nether element only; so that 
when they come to open their windows on God by 
their trust in him—admitting the full revelation of 
his truth and friendship—they are taken up off their 
feet into a higher range of life. They sail abroad in 
a kind of upper-world liberty. Duty now is inclina- 
tion; truth an infinitely serene element; perception 
broad as Heaven and full as the sea; and all the de- 
tentions of world-worship and lust are fallen away. 
They, as it were, only see the world, when they look 
far down where it lies. 

All this by faith; because when we rest ourselves, 
our life and life-character, on God, we prove him and © 
have the sense of him revealed to our immediate 
knowledge. But this faith, it must be observed, is 
not, as appears to be very often understood, any be- 
lief in something about God which is not God; no 
belief in a proposition, or truth, or doctrine, or fact, 
even though it be an atonement made, or legal justifi- 


58 FEET AND WINGS. 


cation provided—these things are things round about, 
having, it may be, a certain relationship and prepara- 
tive concern, but the faith is a wholly transactional 
matter toward God himself, and no mere ereditive as- 
sent or conviction regarding something notional or no- 
tionally affirmed. It is the man’s new, self-commit- 
ting, trusting act, by which he puts himself out on 
trust, and begins to live suspensively on God, as every 
ereated spirit, whether under sin or clear of it, is 
made to live. It is a trusting of person to person, 
substantive being to substantive being, sinner to Say- 
iour; in this manner it is in effect a sublime act of 
migration upward into the range of spirit, where it 
lives inspirationally, and has all things new. 
Accordingly, just here begins the great struggle of 
Christian experience I am wishing to illustrate. Can 
the soul thus lifted stay above in that serene element 
into which is is ascended? Plainly enough, it is pos- 
sible only as we keep good the faith, or, when it ebbs, 
renew it. It must be faith, too,still in the person of 
God or of Christ; not any faith in something about 
God and secondary only to what is personal in him. 
It must be such faith as lives derivatively from him, 
and bathes itself in the revelation or inner sense of his 
friendship. And precisely here—here and never any 
where else—is the difficulty; that the disciple has 
gravitations in him still, that pull him all the while 
downward, and settle him on his feet before he knows 
it. And then, as soon as he begins to stand, his wings 
are folded, of course. Even as the flying creatures 


FEET AND WINGS. 59 


fold their wings instinctively when they settle on their 
feet, having, for the time, no use for them. The mo- 
ment he begins to rest on mortal supports, and find 
his hope in mortal good, he ceases in the same degree 
to live by faith. And it comes to pass so naturally or 
insensibly that he forgets himself. Let us trace some 
of the instances and ways in which it comes to pass. 

He is a man of enterprise, and begins to think of 
independence; and the independent state that draws 
him on becomes, how easily, how insensibly, the non- 
depending state. His successes are honest successes. 
His economies are only rational and right. But he 
does not hang on Providence as he did, in a per- 
petually sweet, bright confidence. His prayers lose 
out their fervors, and his peace flows only as a turbid 
river. Kven God is far less dear and less consciously 
present than he was. How long is there going to be 
faith enough left to have the consciousness of his 
presence at all? 

Sometimes the disciple drops out of faith unwit- 
tingly, in overdoing the search after evidences of it. 
What should be that evidence but the faith itself, even 
as the day bring its own evidence; ‘or, better still, as 
we get evidence of warmth by the immediate feeling 
of it, when we can not find the heat by any hunt of in- 
spection or search beside. Suppose he finally gets the 
evidence of his divine calling made up. It is made 
up in his understanding, of course, and it might as 
well be made up by computations in arithmetic. He 
has, in fact, descended out of faith to get evidences 


60 FEET AND WINGS. 


that dispense with faith. He wants no inspirations 
longer, for he has made good his proofs. Henceforth 
he burns, if at all, without flame. He is down upon 
his feet, and has really undertaken to be a foot-pas- 
senger all through. 

By a very common mistake, the disciple who is 
losing ground, instead of going back to his faith, puts 
his will into the struggle, and thinks to recover him- 
self by his will. Fighting out his battle now by self- 
endeavor, he makes it a losing battle, of course. De- 
feated and discouraged, he knows not how, he an- 
swers, with a sigh, Am I not doing everything for 
success? Yes, every thing but the only thing, viz., 
to believe in God; that is forgotten. And what can 
he do by his mere will-force and resolvedness, when 
the heavenly trust is wanting? He might as well 
think to leap out of the Gulf Stream by the spring of 
his feet. The harder throes he makes, the deeper he 
sinks, of course. 

Another class of disciples, of a naturally faithful 
habit, when their fervors abate, and their enjoyment 
of God ceases to buoy them up, seeing no help for it, 
subside, as it were dutifully, into a mere routine prac- 
tice, or observance of times. They gravitate down- 
ward on regularity ; consenting thus to a regulation 
service on foot, since it can no longer be a service in 
impulse and liberty. Unblest and dry, they are none 
the les$ punctual and exact. They mean at least, to be 
faithful ; and they hope there may be some good in it, 
only of a duller sort than it should be. Perhaps 


FEET AND WINGS. 61 


there may ; only how much better if they could be 
sure of some little faith in their faithfulness; which, 
if they had it but as a grain of mustard seed, would 
kindle, at least, an observable fire. Had their faith 
but a one-wing power, it ought, in the flapping, to lift 
them visibly a few feet upward now and then. 
Sometimes again it happens, that a disciple who is 
losing ground, is taken advantage of by the plea of 
worldly conformity, and tempted to make his losing 
more complete than he knows. He thinks he can do 
more by a more winning address, that more readily 
propitiates favor. So he shortens the distance be- 
tween himself and the world, that he may shorten the 
distance between the world and himself. He under- 
takes to be more human, expecting to be as much 
more Christian, and becomes, in fact, as much less 
Christian as he is more human. I grant the possi- 
bility of an over-austere practice, that may fitly be 
softened; but this study of conformities is a wonder- 
fully delicate matter, which none but a man of inflex- 
ible tenacity should ever dare to indulge ; nor even he, 
save as he is high enough lifted by his faith in God to 
suffer no bent downward, but in social recognitions, 
or Christian pity and tears. Cultivating the conform- 
ities is only a plausible way of being mired in them. 
Buying off the world by taking its manners, shows, 
fashions, and pleasures, turns out, almost certainly, to 
be a selling off to the world and joining it. A con- 
versation above is the same thing as living above, 
and whoever undertakes to grade, and guage a 
6 


62 FEET AND WINGS. 


smoothly fascinating, ground-surface road will, of 
course, be moving on the ground, and not ascending 
into faith at all. 

To give one illustration more: it often happens 
that a disciple thinks to steady and fortify his faith, 
by a more practiced investigation and deeper studies 
in matters of opinion. And it is not to be denied 
that certain benefits may thus be gained. But the 
difficulty is that when he gets occupied in questions 
of the understanding, he is likely to be engrossed by 
them, and seek his light in them, having it no more 
by faith at all. Then, of course, he is down upon the 
levels of mere Nature. Hence the fact so often re- 
marked, that young men going into theologic studies 
are apt to lose ground visibly, to the grief of many 
friends, in their piety. They pass into a sphere where 
scheme and system are building, and get stalled in the 
industry of the head. They forget that opinion 
builds from below, and undertakes to be a pillar by 
its own firm standing. We think, it may be, that we 
touch bottom, and get sure footing in it; but the fatal 
thing is that it is a footing more literal than it should 
be—a standing that is on the feet. We are going, as 
we think, to be kited or aerially floated no more, and 
will now have things in the solid. But our solidity 
‘turns out to be a living on the dry nuggets of articu- 
lated deductions, and not on the uplifting grace of 
God’s inspirations. We settle thus out of grace into 
formulations of grace, when, of course, our wings are 
down. Would that a great many thousands of 


FEET AND WINGS. . 63 


the more gifted souls could not find the meaning of 
this. 

Our conclusion, then, is that all unsteadiness, 
wavering, collapse,in Christian living, is caused some- 
how, in one way or another—for the ways are num- 
berless—by dropping out of the simple first faith, and 
beginning to rest on supports from below. The 
moment any disciple touches ground with but the tip 
of his foot, and begins to rest himself but in part on 
earthly props, a mortal weakness takes him and he 
goes down. And there is no need of it. Nothing is 
more simple than this law of trust. God, too, is a 
being faithful enough to be trusted in at all times; 
and if the disciple is faithful enough to abide in his 
trust, he will abide in God, and have God’s inspira- 
tions in him, move in God’s liberty. If at any time 
he begins to subside, a calm and loving return to his 
trust will assuredly recover him. And he is not 
obliged, living in this key, to remit or let go any of 
his studies, or toils, or engagements. He will only 
carry himself the more steadily in them, and with 
less friction of disturbance, that his soul is rested in 
God by his faith. Sometimes it may be that his faith 
is shut in by morbid vapors, obscurations from dis- 
ease; but then he has only to believe the more strong- 
ly, waiting for his obscurations to be cleared. He 
need not ever be troubled or put in concern by them. 
Even the sun has obscurations; but above them it 
abides in the tranquillities, and waits till it has burned 
a way through. 


64 FEET AND WINGS. 


II. It will be seen by help of the same illustration, 
how it is that a great many persons who mean to be, 


and really think they are, disciples, miss ever going _ 


above a service on foot, by not conceiving at all the 
more ethereal range of experience, into which true 
faith would lift them. 

They undertake, for example, to become reformers 
and philanthropists, and really believe that they are 
more superlatively, genuinely Christian in it, than 
others who have more to say of experiences. They, 
at least, mean business in their religion; caring little, 
as they think they ought, for the fervors that are not 
fervors of work. Their argument, or operative power 
is commonly human opinion, and the combining and 
rolling up of great masses of opinion is the means by 
which they expect to carry their projected reforms. 
In such a mode of action, censure and storm and fiery 
denunciation are naturally close at hand; and are not 
much further off when they assume to be wielding 
most especially the motive principles of religion. 
They would be very much hurt by any reluctance to 
own them as disciples; and yet they do not even con- 
ceive themselves, many times, that they are disciples 
because of their repentances, or prayers, or the 
sensing of God by their faith, or by meekness, pa- 
tience, or any other grace that separates them from 
the world. Their element is agitation, seldom any 
way of appeal that bears a look of Christian peace or 
repose. They have much to say of love; but they 
visibly hate more strongly than they love. Their very 


: 


FEET AND WINGS. 65 


philanthropy is pugnant and oppugnant, and works 
altogether by that method. Sometimes the reform 
they are after is a good one, and is sorely wanted; 
which makes it the more sad that they must drive it 
by mere human force, going never above, to descend 
upon it by inspirations there kindled, but keeping 
their feet and warring with the evils to be removed 
hand to hand, on the same level with them. 
Sometimes, again, there is a way of self-culture at- 
tempted in the name of religion, which is not in any 
proper sense religious, having no element of faith in 
it, and expecting no uplifting help from gracious in- 
spirations. The self-culture is what a man may do 
upon himself; mending his defects, correcting his mis- 
takes, chastening his faults, tempering his passions, 
putting himself into the charities he has learned, from 
Christ perhaps, to admire, finishing himself in the 
graces that have won his approval or commanded his 
respect.. But the work is a far more hopeless one 
than he imagines, and is almost sure to result even 
visibly, in more affectations of character than are 
likely to be much approved. Besides, it holds him to 
a continual self-contemplation which is selfish, and 
keeps him all the while filing and polishing on his 
nature by his will; which is, in fact, the most weari- 
some possible, or rather impossible, kind of self-at- 
tention. The old faults conquered, too, will be coming 
back on him just when he is conquering another set. 
And, turning round to fight them off, he will find the 
whole swarm loose upon him again; till, finally, get- 
6* 


66 FEET AND WINGS. 


' ting worried and vexed and soured and discouraged, 
he virtually, though perhaps not consciously, gives 
over his whole undertaking. O, if he could have gone 
up to Christ, or to God, in a true faith-culture, and 
let his faults fall off, as blasted flowers fall off the 
trees, dislodged by the life-principle in them, his beau- 
tiful thought of finishing a character would have been 
how easily put forward—without a care, too, and in 
the sweetest liberty. No man finishes a character 
who does not go above himself, and take the culture 
of God’s own Spirit; by that growing out a character 
from within which can not be manipulated inwardly 
from without. If there be any good gift that cometh 
from above, and can not be made below, it is char- 
acter. 

Ritualism is another foot-passenger that having no 
sufficient conception of faith, has, of course, no better 
conception of the higher ranges of life prospected by 
it. There is, in fact, a gravitating principle in us all, 
that settles us down upon the ritual way when it can. 
Bound to have a religion of some kind, because we 
have a religious nature, we begin, almost unwittingly, 
to have one that is manipulated by our senses and 
sensuous tastes. We are caught thus by the forms. 
They are beautiful, and a fine-looking, comely religion 
they make. All the better that they are so nearly 
level with our natural faculties, and just as easy to be 
used without faith as with! These reverential rounds 
and airs, these priestly ceremonials—what a charm of 
worship is in them! How convenient, also, to have a 


FEET AND WINGS. 67 


religion that works secundum artem, and lets the faiths 
and fervors take care of themselves! Saying prayers, 
too—how much better and easier than to pray, and 
find how to be heard. Having gotten thus a good 
sufficiency of religion below, and settled their feet 
down squarely on it, they really think it a considera- 
ble improvement. But the sad thing is, that, instead 
of raising the disciple up in glorious inspirations, and 
giving him free wing, they humble him and keep him 
down ; so that, if at any time his native longings set 
him on being more earnest in them, they become, in 
fact, a superstition. 

Again, there is a class of men outside of the church, 
or sometimes in it, who undertake to be religious or 
Christian, and really suppose they are, because of a 
certain patronage they give to the church and the 
word. What they do not bring in fellowship they 
propose to add by counsel and management. Con- 
sciously not being in the gift of spiritual discernment, 
their tastes will be the better, and they will the better 
know what excesses are to be restrained, and what 
aberrations avoided. And, as there are always a 
great many reasons why a thing should not be done, 
to any single reason why it should, they assume, as 
they are rich in the negatives, to be specially quali- 
fied critics. These critical powers, too, they propose 
to contribute for the benefit of the cause; while 
others less gifted in such matters may contribute their 
prayers! Of course, these negatives belong not to 
the range of the Spirit and the glorious proprieties of 


68 FEET AND WINGS. 


God; but to the nether world of fashion, or opinion, 
or custom, and are only rude, blind prejudices at that. 
The sermon has too much faultfinding. The deacons 
are too ready to appear on all occasions. It would be 
much better if the brethren would be more silent. 
Lhe women are a great deal more forward and stren- 
uous than belongs to their sex. 

O, these unilluminated wisdoms, that have only 
feet and no wings at all—it is as if eagles had fallen 
out of their element and descended to be cranes, 
pleased that the legs they stand upon have grown so 
tall and trim, and are able to wade in such deep 
water! But, alas! for these infantry birds; if they 
could but drop their uncomely stilts, to soar as eagles 
do and burn their wings in the sun, they would be as 
much higher in their range as they pretend high 
standing less. Giving themselves over in trust to the 
Saviour, instead of giving their opinions and tastes, 
their patronage of his cause might cease, and their 
contributions to it have a worthier significance. 

Once more, there is a class who distrust all the sup- 
posed experiences in religion, doing it thoughtfully, as 
they suppose, on grounds of sufficient reason. All 
visions and revelations of the Lord they disrespect. 
- It offends them to hear any thing said of spiritual 
discernment, cr the discerning of spirits, or of special 
gifts, or of divine monitions, or of answers to prayer, 
or of calls to particular duties and works. They like 
to see things keep the level of Nature more nearly, 
and observe a more prudent and judiciously mod- 


FEET AND WINGS. 69 


erated way. Inspirations are nothing ; judgments 
every thing. And they have it as a maxim, that soar- 
ing experiences of every kind, all supernatural up- 
liftings and fervors, are only fantastics that had best 
be avoided. Now Moses was a great lawgiver, and 
has always been considered a very solid man; but he 
was most certainly in a different way. Or, taking a 
later and more strictly Christian example, the Apostle 
Paul, what shall we say of that story he tells the Cor- 
inthians of his very strange experience “ fourteen 
years ago?” Perhaps he was a little bewildered by 
it himself, and has kept the thing under advisement 
all this time, to be sure of it. But he is able now, 
as we see, to glory somewhat. Was lie not caught up 
to the third heaven? Was he not even doubtful 
whether he was in the body or out of the body? 
Why, it is a first point, is it not, to know that we are 
in the body. And some of us would be as good as 
nowhere if not in the body. True, the great man 
talks in his overmodesty here of glorying in his 
“infirmities ;” but he dares, we see, to glory a 
little, nevertheless. And it was his way to be going 
up always into.these high regions, so that he was not 
sure at times whether he had a thing by revelation or 
not, and even had a considerable notion that angels 
were getting high impressions out of him, and God’s 
work in him and by him. Yes, he was just the kind 
of high-flying saint that the wise, blind folk of this 
world most surely disrespect. Not knowing what 
faith is, how could they know to what third heaven it 


70 FEET AND WINGS. 


may lift? So they called him “mad,” as we know. 
They could not call- him a mystic, or a quietist, or a 
pietist, or a Methodist, or a Calvinist, or a Low 
Churchman; for these terms of stigma were not yet 
ready. So they called him “mad,” because he did 
not stay on foot in their level of sanity. Was he then 
a flighty person? Does not the world even bow down 
to him, nevertheless, as the grand, intellectual, theo- 
logic chief of Christianity? And was there ever, in 
fact, a soul more massive and sublimely steady in its 
equilibrium than his? 


What, now, having all these expositions before us, 
is the conclusion of the whole matter? What but 
this, that true religion, according to the Christian idea, 
makes an immensely wide chasm by the faith at 
which it begins, or in which it is born? It is not any 
mere playing out of Nature on its own level; but it 
is the lifting up of the man above himself in a trans- 
formation that makes him new to himself. No more 
flesh, but spirit, ranging above the world in all the 
liberties of spirit. In so far as he is a Christian, 
he occupies another sphere, and becomes the citizen 
of another kingdom. This he will believe, and will 
not only dare to be thus lifted, but will scarcely dare 
not to be. For, whatever disrespect he may encoun- 
ter, in what so many will consider his fantastic way, 
he will have evidences in himself that ask no certifi- 
cation. Besides, he will have learned, shortly, that 
the only safe way of living for him is the highest, and 


FEET AND WINGS. 71 


that no other is entirely safe. For in this highest 
range he will be conscious that his disorders are 
quelled, his internal jars and discords laid, his irrup- 
tions and tumults brought under, and a glorious se- 
renity and clearness, pervasive as the day, established 
in him. All which, if he settles away from his trust, 
or sinks below his calling, gives way correspondently 
before the refluent forces of night and nature in him, 
and leaves him sweltering in the old misrule. The 
ancients had a fabled giant who could not be subdued, 
because, whenever he fell, his mother, the earth, let 
' such power into him that he forthwith sprung up, at 
the moment of contact, and slew his antagonist; till, 
finally, Hercules, discovering the secret, held him up 
in his grapple, not allowing him to touch the ground, 
and so crushed him. Exactly contrary it is with the 
Christian. The earth is not his mother, he is a child 
of the sun; and, if he descends to settle on the 
ground, his strength vanishes. 

If, then, we are to make our ascent into this higher 
plane of true Christian experience, it will be seen that 
all the ties which bind us down, or hold us to our feet, 
must be effectually cut by our habitual self-renuncia- 
tions. Not even right hands and right eyes can be 
kept back from the sacrifice. Selfishness and self-in- 
dulgence are no more for us. Coming down no more 
upon the world, we must lift up every thing we do in 
it, and hope from it, into that pure life of sacrifice 
and trust in which we abide with our Master. It 
must be with us here as it was with Noah when he 


72 FEET AND WINGS. 


made the ark. He did not expect partly to wade and 
partly to float; but he went in, he and his, taking all 
the freight of his world-stock with him, when the 
Lord shut him in. The waters now became his ele- 
ment, and he had no other. So, when we go up into 
faith, we need to be shut in by severance from every 
natural trust. Our expectation must be rested on 
God, not on pillars of any kind below—pillars are not 
wanted under wings. 


IV, 
THE GOSPEL OF THE FACK. 


“For God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness 
hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge 
of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ..—2 Cor. 4: 6. 


Tue light of the knowledge of the glory of God—a 
mighty and glorious gospeling certainly! and where 
is it shown or testified? In the face of Jesus Christ. 
Faces are the natural images or exponents of persons, 
windows in bodies at which we see the souls looking 
out. Every face accurately represents the man be- 
hind it; so that when we get once thoroughly ac- 
quainted with him, we can not imagine the possibility 
that he should have a face at all different. I am not 
sure, however, that the apostle meant to make so fine 
a point of the mere face taken simply as the fore- 
front of the head. The word he uses is a larger word 
than our English word face, denoting the whole as- 
pect, or personal embodiment, that which reveals the 
true presence and character-type of the man. And 
this revelation regarding it as made by the Saviour’s 
whole person—he conceives to be the fact-form gos- 
pel, blazoned in his life, and brought forth into living 
expression by his personal demonstrations. And he 

7 (73) 


74 THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 


even conceives that there is a kind of absolute force in 
it, though he probably means to say it only in a figure; 
declaring that God hath shined in our hearts, even as 
when he commanded the light to shine out of darkness 
in the creation of the world. It is a kind of personal 
power, he would say, that is next thing to omnipotence. 

What I propose therefore, now, is to speak of Zhe 
Gospel of the Face, or more accurately and scripturally 
stated, The Gospel in the Face of Jesus Christ. 

My conviction is that we put the gospel too gen- 
erally out of its proper divine form, into our own 
human form, serving it, as it were, in our own 
color, as we have shaped and colored it for our- 
selves. We conceive what it ought to be to an- 
swer the conditions we appoint for it, and then, 
by a huge milling process of construetion—by much 
theologizing, propositionizing, schematizing, and ab- 
stractionizing, we show it builded together, for the 
very ends and uses we have reasoned for it. It be- 
comes in this manner our gospel; if not the expres- 
sion of our face, the abstractional form and frame- 
work we have gotten up to do the work that required, 
as we think, to be done. How far we go in. this ab- 
stractive, theoretic way may be seen from the terms 
we bring in to serve our speculative, scheme-building 
uses. Thus in our theology we have these for the 
staple of our doctrine, not one of which is found in 
the Scripture at all—justice, satisfaction, merit, sub- 
stitution, compensation, expiation. When I say this 
Iam not objecting wholly to abstractional and theo- 


THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 75 


retic efforts in religion. Some I know are strong in 
the conviction that formulations of the Christian 
truth are necessary to save us from being floated away 
into all kinds of laxity and confusion. Perhaps it 
may be so, as regards the parts of Christianity more 
easily reducible to propositions and terms of abstract 
statement. But I seriously doubt whether the more 
strictly proper matter of our gospel is capable of any 
such thing. For it lies in sentiment wholly, in what 
goes to make impression by expression—in love, in 
purity, in divine beauty, in sorrow, in suffering well 
and wisely. Conceive what a person may impress, 
and do, and be, in the phases of a tragically great 
life, and how far off are we from so much as im- 
agining the possibility of propositionizing the man. 
Besides, what is Christ in his person, but God’s own 
formulization of himself, 2. e. not the statement, but 
the image of himself. What less than a very bold 
irreverence then can it be to substitute the revela- 
tion-form or face of God, by any so prosy thing as a 
formula in words. And the more evidently is this 
true,that all that Christ was and did is summed up in 
character and feeling. Perhaps we make up an ac- 


count of Christ, or of what he has done, which is | 


like this—God is just and must be; therefore he 
could not forgive sin, without first satisfying his jus- 
tice by some expiation, or making amends to his gov- 
ernment by some exhibition equivalent to the execu- 
tion of penalty; he therefore takes from his Son and 
his suffering cross, what was justly due from us, and 


76 THE GOSPEL OF THE FAOER. 


we are released, or rather justified. Is it then pos. 
sible, I would ask, for any human creature, to read 
over this mortally dry record, this mere pile of bricks 
—and not miss something most dear, every thing most 
dear, in hearing him talk, and looking in his face, and 
going with him out into Gethsemane and up to Pi- 
late’s hall of judgment ? 

Let us see now if there is not a gospel of the face, 
an all transcending fact-form, life-form gospel made 
out for us, which it behooves us always to live in, and 
have also living in us; for the most living form of the 
doctrine is that, of course, which as our human nature 
works will have the most immediate and divinest 
power. 

1. Let us look into the New Testament and dis- 
tinguish, if we can, what is called preaching there. 
And we find our apostle testifying,—‘ Whom we 
preach, * * that we may present every man per- 
fect in Christ Jesus.” He does not say about whom, 
or the just account and formula of whom, but whom; 
the fact-form man, the life, and life-history, and feel- 
ing, and’ sorrow, and death, and resurrection of the 
man. ‘Whom we preach,” that is, ery, proclaim, 
publish as good tidings, set forth as a fact-matter 
news or story—the word is not theologize, resolve, 
reduce, but preach. The souls to be gained are also 
to be presented “ perfect in Christ Jesus ;” that is, in 
the new possibilities and powers of grace embodied 
for them in the face and person, or personal life, of 
their incarnate Redeemer. 


—<——-- 


THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 77 


‘Again the same apostle declares, more stringently 
and by exclusion, what and what only he could suffer 
himself to preach,—* For I determined not to know 
any thing among you save Jesus Christ, and Him 
crucified.” We often cite the words as authority for 
preaching nothing but a certain ruggedly articulated, 
formulated doctrine of the cross, or justification by 
the cross. This is our meaning, not his. The very 
thing he means to say, with sharpest emphasis, is that, 
when preaching among them, he had felt bound to 
make Christ himself every thing, and his own specula- 
tions or humanly contrived opinions, nothing. 

Great varieties of word and symbol come up on all 
sides in the New Testament, centering in the same 
general impression. Thus Christ is bread, calls him- 
self “the bread that came down from heaven.” But 
no preaching about bread ever fed any body. Noth- 
ing answers but a fit dispensing of the bread, that is 
of Christ himself. ‘“ He that eateth me shall live by 
me.” 

Again he declares that, when he is lifted up, he is go- 

ing to become a healer of souls in being simply looked 
| upon, as the serpent lifted up was a healer in the wil- 
derness. He does not imagine that some notional 
view, or opinion, or doctrine of the being lifted up, is 
going to heal, but that he himself lifted up will do it. 
Medicines cure by what they are, not by what is said 
of them or reasoned about them. 

Again, calling himself the éruth,—‘I am the 
truth,’—he does not think of his gospel as a proposié 

* , 


78 THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 


tional matter, but as being worded in his person, and 
receivable only from his person—just the point where 
Christianity differs from all the theorizing doctrines of 
the philosophers. It is no Christian idea that we are 
going to be converted and sanctified through the 
truth, in the sense that we are going to manipulate 
and manage, convert and sanctify ourselves by good 
abstractions installed in our heads. Our Christ is to be 
the truth beheld in living expression. No matter 
what notions we have gotten booked for a gospel, he 
is all the gospel there is himself. 

He is called again and calls himself the if. How 
the life? Because, the abstractional believer will 
commonly answer, he clears our liability to punish- 
ment which is death, and prepares a salvable condi- 
tion for us. A salvable condition, life! Any con- 
dition, life! Soil, sun, dew—are these vegetable life, 
any or all of them? No, the soul lives only when life 
itself comes, that is, when Christ has entered the soul 
as life. ‘And you hath he quickened who were dead 
in trespasses and sins.” It is he within that is life, 
and not any thing he is conceived to have done, to pre- _ 
pare a new condition, or work out a governmental ex- 
igency for us. 

It is very important, also, to notice what directions 
are given concerning the use of the incarnate person 
—and especially that all questions of psychological 
analysis are put by. The word is, “This is my be 
loved son, hear ye him.” It does not say, fall to work 
upon the problem of his person, resolve the psychol- 


THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE, 79 


ogy of his parts, as if he were no miracle, but let 
him be the miracle he is and hear; hear ye him, the 
one single being Aim. Distinguishing the parts of his 
composition in a manner that is quite too common, 
the part that suffers and the part that does not, the 
part that increases in knowledge and the part that 
does not, the part that prays, and the part that does 
not, the part that works in a miracle, and the part 
that does not, makes him two persons, and not one, a 


_ Son of God who is not Son of man, and a Son of man 


who is not Son of God; and then what is he to us 
but a kind of double personation, dodging all appre- 
hension? Exactly contrary to this he is to be two 
poles in unity, a solidly concrete, impenetrable, un- 
solvable person—God’s full beauty and love in the 
human type or face, “the Word made flesh.” Look 
ye hither, mortals, the Eternal is here, a Friend—per- 
fect, sinless, bringing good-will, and emptying God’s 
bosom into yours—hear ye him. God is the mean- 
ing, man is the face—so much we know, for it is 
given; more we do not care to know. 

But there is a common belief that Paul, who had 
the very best and deepest understanding of the gospel, 
made up carefully and steadily, preached a theorizing 
gospel, dealing with all ruggedest and deepest problems 
of abstraction, even as our Christian schools do now. 
The fact is very different. He did present and pub- 
lish Christ in terms out of which we are accustomed 
to draw, by inference, many articles, but he never 
drew them himself. We have done it so long that his 


80 THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 


words appear to signify, themselves, the very things 
we get by construction out of them. But in this we 
greatly mistake, as may be seen by the one single fact, 
universally conceded by the Christian scholars and 
writers of dogmatic history, that no theoretic or ab- 
stractive doctrine of Christ’s work was ever stated or 
taught during the first ten centuries of the Christian 
Church—none, of course, by Paul; for in that case, be- 
ing formally set forth in his epistles, it took the church 
ten whole centuries to find it! Far more likely it is 
that we draw him into such constructions by our own 
inferences. The inferences may be just, but, since he 
did not make them himself, they are no part certainly 
of the gospel he preached. The remarkable thing 
about his preaching, on the contrary, is that he ad- 
heres so closely to the fact-view of the gospel. Using 
many terms that we have carried on to a point of 
meaning more theoretic and abstractive, he stops 
short himself, in the purely practical power of the 
story. Other men have gone farther since his day, 
and seen, perhaps, just as much less. His justification 
is practical, based in no speculated scheme of satisfac- 
tion, being simply “the righteousness of God,” in 
Christ’s most righteous life, “ unto all and upon all 
them that believe”—a “declaring [in-showing] of 
the righteousness of God,” to make us righteous be- 
fore him. Neither does he quit the fact-form view of 
the Gospel, or go at all beyond it in the figures of 
offering and sacrifice, and blood, and cleansing, so pro- 
fusely applied and with so great unction, to set forth 


THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 81 


its meaning. It has taken long ages of drill and ob- 
servance to prepare these figures, and he sees God’s 
evangelic purpose working in them from the first. 
He finds them made ready as chariots for his Master’s 
life and passion, and putting them in harness, drives 
them, burdened with atoning love and grace, directly 
into men’s hearts. How else but by these images 
from the altar could he tell a guilt-stricken world 
what the incarnate Son of Man, obedient unto death, 
has done for them. Meantime he is always recurring 
to the gospel of the face, the manifested and ex- 
pressed glory, as to the pole-star of his Christed life 
and ministry ; testifying that “God was in Christ ;” 
that “we all, with open face, beholding as in a glass 
[z.¢, in Christ] the glory of the Lord, are changed 
into the same image from glory to glory ;” that “ God 
hath, in these last days, spoken to us by his Son, who 
also is the brightness of his glory, the express image 
of his person.” 

Consider now,— 

2. What importance there may be in some revela- 
tion, or presentation of God, which enters him into 
the world as he can be entered in no form of abstrac- 
tion. The very purpose of the incarnation is to get 
by or away from abstractions, and give the world a 
concrete personation. Thus in Christ’s living person, 
we are to have God, who is above all history, entered 
into history, and by such human ways of life as his- 
tory takes note of, becoming incorporate in it. And 
to make the fact historic, and no mere theophany, he 


82 THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 


stays thirty whole years among us, descending to our 
human level, as being under all but the sin of it, 
weaving all God’s charities and healing mercies inte 
it, teaching how divinely, as no mortal teacher could, 
suffering with us and for us, and strangest of all by 
us, and so unbosoming all God’s beauty as a God who 
can pity and seek after his enemies. And he has, 
withal—expressing in it, we may almost think, more 
than by all beside—a face. Who of us has not sighed 
many times for a look upon that face, and the light of 
the knowledge of the glory of God therein revealed ! 
O what depth of meaning, and height of meaning, 
and purity of meaning, what tender composure, what 
restful strength, what majesty of good, and grace of 
sorrow, and close-drawn human sympathy was there 
in it—all saying “look unto me,” “come unto me.” 
And such is the concrete, staple matter brought in for 
us in the gospel. It is all person, what a person is 
and feels and does and suffers in the out-door forms of 
human life and action. It hangs for the matter of it, 
not on abstract teachings, but on the personal pro- 
nouns, the J the me, the he, the him, of his divine 
manifestation. 

He is to be the concrete of all government and per- 
fection, let into the world in such visible deific force 
and super-earthly quality, that, having once gotten 
the sense of it, and the transcendent miracle em- 
bodied in it, we are satisfied—we know God; the 
light of the knowledge of the glory of God hath 
shined ih our hearts. 


THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 83 


_ There is also another most cogent reason for this 
concrete or incarnate presentation; viz., to beget a 
more benign, more thoroughly felt impression of the 
just severities of God. They must come as out of 
feeling, else they are feeble and cold,and without evi- 
dence beside. Terrors and reproofs, let fall thumping 
on the world out of abstract deity, do not come in 
power. They sufficiently impress only when they 
speak out of a mind that feels, or is visibly bathed in 
- sympathy and sorrow. Who but Christ then ever 
gave us any vital impression of God’s hatred to sin? 
Authority had been asserted before, condemnations 
pronounced, judgments uttered, but who ever heard 
them, as when spoken by the loving, suffering Son of 
Man? Hell was never so deep, justice never so 
dreadful, or so close at hand, as when they lowered in 
his divine face. Woeto the hypocrites! Woe to the 
oppressors! Woe to the learned thieves of God’s 
kingdom! Woe to all ungodly now! No such ap- 
palling sense of God’s justice was ever bolted into 
human bosoms by the severities of unseen, abstract 
deity, as when that justice spoke in the voice, or glit- 
tered in the wrath of the Lamb. Here is justice in 
feeling, and this concrete man who feels, is the judge 
of the world. Many persons who are much con- 
cerned lest Christ should not make due compensation 
to the justice of God for the release of sin, appear to 
be concerned without reason. Half his power con- 
_ sists in the fact that justice comes out as in concrete 

embodiment with him. 


84 THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 


Advancing now to a point still deeper we per- 
ceive— 

3. That if there is to be any remedy for the precise 
disability and woe of sin, it must be such as may, in 
some way, restore God to his place in the soul. What 
is our misery in the state under evil, but that we are 
separated from God’s occupancy or indwelling by it— 
“alienated from the life of God?” Therefore no mere 
body of opinional truths or doctrines meets our case— 
nothing meets it but to give us back, in some way, the 
personal inhabitation we have lost. Our gospel has 
no relativity, save when it embodies or envisages the 
divine love and friendship powerfully enough to enter 
them into our life. Reinspiration is our first want ; 
for not even the Holy Spirit reinspires save as he 
shows the things of Christ objectively within. “TI in 
them, and Thou in me, that they may be made perfect 
in one,” is, in fact, the very gospel, and the whole of 
it. Finding us emptied of God, it undertakes to 
bring us God, and recommunicate God; not some no- 
tional truth or truths about God, but God’s indwelling 
life itsel#—“ I in them.” God is to look himself in 
again from the face of Jesus. Or, what is nowise dif- 
ferent, Jesus dying into our dead sympathies, is to 
enter back the Divine, and quicken us to life. Opin- 
ions, formulated notions, or abstractive articles,can do 
nothing plainly as regards the rehabilitation of God. 
Nothing is at all apposite but incarnation, or what is 
the same, a living gospel worded to our feeling, in the 
face of Jesus and the concrete matter of his life. 


THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 85 


4, It is a consideration having great weight, that no 
other kind of doctrine but that which adheres to the 
concrete, matter-of-fact gospel makes a true, or any 
but a false, point for faith. Salvation we say is by 
faith, and what is faith? A great first question at 
which many stumble. Faith they assume to be a be- 
lief in something true propositionally. They even 
assume that we put men in a way to be saved, only 
when we give them just the propositions they must 
believe. Now the propositions may be true or not—I 
make no question here about them—I only protest 
that such a notion of faith totally mistakes the nature 
and meaning of faith. Gospel faith has nothing to do 
with any propositional truth whatever. There is no 
proposition, or hundred propositions, that can not be 
believed, and have not been, times without number, 
having yet no gracious effect whatever. 

No, the faith that brings salvation is the act of a 
being towards a being, sinner to Saviour, man to 
God. ‘He that believeth in me,” says Christ, not he 
that believeth some things, or many things, about me. 
It isthe act of an undone, lost man, giving himself 
over in trust to Jesus Christ, person to person ; a total 
consenting to Christ, to be of him, and with him, and 
for him, to let him heal and renovate, and govern, and 
be made unto him wisdom, and righteousness, and 
sanctification, and redemption, in one word, every 
thing. The simple first point of it is Christ, a Sav- 
iour, manifested in such love and divinity that, taken 
for salvation as a being, he can be trusted. And 

8 


86 THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 


when he is thus trusted, that is faith. Propositions 
are needed of course, facts about him are needed, to 
prepare the conception of him, so that he may be 
trusted—the very gospel story is made of such. These 
too must be believed, but the believing of them is not 
faith at all, and never did or can save any body. 
Saving faith is person trusted to person—that and 
nothing else. 

5. It is a fact to be carefully noted, that all the 
best saints and most impressive teachers of Christ are 
those who have found how to present him best in the 
dramatic forms of his personal history. Such were 
Chrysostom, Augustine, Luther, Tauler, Wesley. 
These great souls could not be shut up under the 
opinional way of doctrine, or even under their own 
opinions. Their gospel was not dry, and thin, and 
small in quantity, as being in man’s quantity, and 
therefore soon exhausted ; it was no part of their idea 
to be always hammering in, or hammering on, some 
formulated article, but they had a wonderful out- 
spreading of life and volume, because they breathed 
so freely the supernatural inspirations of Christ, and 
let their inspirations forth in such grand liberties of 
utterance. They were men thoroughly Christed by 
their inspirations and deep beholdings in the gospel 
facts. They had gotten such insight into the ways 
and times and occasions of their Master’s life, that sub- 
jects enough, and truths always fresh, were springing 
into form, in all points of the story; and these, too, 
not mere surface subjects, but profound, cogent, mass- 


THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 87 


ive, piercing, pricking in conviction, melting ice 
bound states away, battering down every citadel of 
prejudice, and flowing out in senses of God that 
made a wonderfully divine atmosphere about the 
circles they livedin, and the audiences before which 
they appeared. 


Such now I conceive is the true gospel of ‘Christ 
and our question is answered. But the answer itself 
will be questioned in two or three points which also 
require to be noticed. 

Thus it may be questioned, whether certain persons 
of a sharply inquisitive mold will not do best, when 
conducting their processes more analytically and ab- 
stractively, that being the form in which all subjects 
have most reality to them, and take the deepest hold 
of their convictions. But if what is simply beheld or 
presented takes no hold of their convictions, if only 
what they. reason or think, or logically sift, has mean- 
ing to them, it may be questioned with quite as good 
reason whether they are living in God’s light at all. 
There certainly are many such, just as there are many 
children who can never be satisfied when a flower is 
given them, till they have picked it in pieces—when 
of course it is no flower at all. Fire is the greatest 
analyzer in the world, and the product, ashes. Anal- 
ysis requires dead subjects, but the gospel is not 
dead, and ought not to be killed. Any character an- 
alyzed, Hamlet for example, and put in terms of ab- 
straction, is therefore dead. The only Hamlet is 


88 THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 


Hamlet himself, alive in his own mystery, and not the 
particular salts of tragedy into which he has been 
resolved. So when the disciple, instead of knowing 
Christ himself, a person abnormal, in some sense infi- 
nite, more than we can think, deeper in his mystery 
than human soul can fathom, thinks of nothing but 
analytic powders sifted through his mill of logical 
opinion, the powders may be very abundant and very 
fine, but the Christ is nowhere. 

But there is a duller kind of objection that may 
possibly arise, asking what shall we find to feed us in 
this manner? Shall we not soon have used up all the 
fact of our story, and then what shall we do? As if 
nothing could be inexhaustible but some mere sylla- 
bus or propositional wisdom ; or as if we were likely to 
find that we have used up the gospel! No, rather 
judge there is a poverty of soul in the objection itself, 
that very nearly disqualifies the man. Why, my 
friends, the miners of Nevada will sooner have bored 
out all the silver of the globe and made an empty honey- 
comb of it. Such words spoken by such a character, 
seconded by such miracles, representing visibly two 
worlds, opening vistas into God’s deep nature and 
feeling and counsel, and declaring in self-evidencing 
majesty, the kingdom of God in the world—such a 
gospel vaster than the sea, will not soon be exhausted. 
If the objection were, that one’s soul must be op- 
pressed and stifled rather by the overwhelmingly 
grand subjects it will be raising, it might be more dif 
ficult to answer 


THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 89 


I was thinking, a few days ago, of the large blank 
chapter, so to speak, of the Master’s life, between his 
dispute with the doctors in the temple and his public 
ministry — those eighteen silent years, would that we 
knew something of them.” Whereupon it came up, 
that Jesus was all this time, “subject to his parents,” 
training his great presentiments in a key of filial duty 
both domestic and lowly ; that able to dispute with doc- 
tors, he does not hasten to the schools to be occupied 
with books and questions, but is meditating his “ Fa- 
ther’s business ”—O what meditation that!—in the 
trade of a carpenter; that his custom was “to be 
always at the synagogue in the Sabbath worship, feed- 
ing his great thoughts in what of grace and fellowship 
he could find, among the rustic elders of his people ; 
that he must have been reading the scriptures largely, 
or at least hearing them read, to know exactly where 
the scripture was, relating most to himself, as he 
plainly did, when he stood up, on his last synagogue 
day, to read; having, all the while, O what emotions 
rolling through his soul in the discovery of what the 
prophets were thinking beforehand, of what is now 
dawning in his personal consciousness ; till finally his 
patience, in the waiting of these eighteen silent unhis- 
toric years, occupied with so many thrilling fore- 
gleams of his future, lifts him—rustic boy and man 
that he is—to a pitch of dignity almost inconceivable. 
And so I was sketching a volume, without knowing it, 
and the matter was coming faster than I could 
seize it. Facts that are divine will open wonder 

g* 


90 THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 


fully fast. Propositions are poor and fruitless, 
in comparison. Thus it is for example with every 
most silent, most scantily expressed thing in the life 
of Jesus; his forty days in the wilderness, his “ Go 
and sin no more,” his turning to the lepers afar off, 
the box of ointment, the hem that was touched, the 
tear that stood on his face at the grave of Lazarus, his 
sleep in the boat, his look at the penny, his look up at 
Zaccheus in the tree, his look down upon the city. 
He can not turn his eyes, without turning ours into 
some wondrous discovery of his meaning and glory. 
It is as if he were the index hand of the creation 
and of all God’s works and meanings in it beside, 
and yet there is a misgiving felt in some lest this 
glorious, mysterious, ocean-deep life of Jesus will 
shortly give out; when one or two dull formulas, per- 
haps, drawn out in a few short lines, which a man 
may learn, as an ancient poet said, “standing on one 
leg,” are a quite sufficient gospel stock, ready to be 
preached and kept in preaching, ready to be pivoted 
and kept in seesaw, year by year. No, it is sheer in- 
dolence and sterility that can be stocked in this man- 
ner, and ask to be excused from the real gospel, lest 
it should not yield enough; as to them it certainly will 
not to keep them in supply. The secret of the im- 
posture is evident. If the preacher wants a syllabus, 
and then to call it bread, he scarcely knows, I think, 
his Master’s face, and the light of the knowledge of 
the glory of God has scarcely flickered in his listless 
mind. O, it ought not, whether we make much o. 


— 


THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 91 


little of formula, to be a very irksome thing to study 
the Lord Jesus Christ himself; and whoever does it 
will have subjects rise upon him faster, and vaster, 
and deeper in riches, than he can ever even name, 
without some painful sense of only brushing surfaces 
and saying adequately nothing. 

At this point be it also understood as a fact that 
must not be disguised, that it requires a very deep and 
grandly vitalized experience to know Christ well 
enough to preach him. One may preach a formula 
and know almost nothing of him—nothing but what 
is verbally stuck in his head, or pigeon-holed in his 
memory. But the real Christ is what a Christ may 
be; what he shall signify in a man’s heart; what he is 
to feeling, and faith, and guilt, and bondage, and ever- 
lasting hope, and liberty that makes a sinner free. It 
wants a Christed man to know who Christ really is, 
and show him forth witha meaning. He must be had \ 
by inspiration ; manifested within; opening his gates — 
outward, and upward, and abroad, into all height, and | 
depth, and length, and breadth. 

And yet no mere way of study and inward expe- 
rience will suffice. Christ is no deep meditationist, 
no recluse working out his problems and living in his 
frames, but a wonderfully out-door character. He 
never had a study. He lives on foot, mingles with 
men in the market-places, touching and touched by 
every thing human, chambered not seldom in his sleep 
under the open sky. Common life is the element of 
his sanctities, and his very intuitions have an out-door 


92 THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 


way ; hitting every human creature, low or high, at 
his exact point of merit. He moves about among all 
grades of people, the humble, the weak, the guilt- 
stricken, the proud, the learned, the great ecclesiastics, 
and high public magistrates, superior alike to all, 
gentle as he should be, dreadfully severe as he ought 
to be, doing always what a perfect insight, tempered 
by divinest benefaction, requires. He can not be a 
leveler, will not be a moral or political reformer, 
steadily refuses on principle to be a revolutionist, and 
yet there is no problem of society, as we are discoy- 
ering more and more distinctly, that is not somehow 
illuminated by his teachings and conduct. No man 
really knows him, therefore, who can not take the 
open air of society with him. If his disciple was 
never out-doors in his life, as many disciples never 
were ; or if he never saw any thing, or felt any thing, 
or had any thing touch him when he was, he can not 
have the right sort of experience, and will rather con- 
ceive him as the God-recluse, than as the gloriously 
real and true God-man. 


I will not turn this great subject wholly on the 
faults of preaching; for it is a fact most remarkable 
that Christ has notwithstanding, at this very time, the 
attention, so to speak, of the world as never before ? 
He is not only the chief problem of theology and 
theologic learning, but the literature of the day recog- 
nizes him, and society has a kind of hope in him, and 
the unbelievers, in all grades and conditions, think of 


THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 93 


him with respect and a certain half-developed expecta 
tion. This dim feeling after him, is everywhere. 
The report that was brought him by his disciples, 
“all men seek for thee,” was never, I think, so widely 
true. I do not mean, of course, that it is the Christ 
of the church articles, or the Christ of the saints, that 
is thought of so desiringly; it is only some wonderful 
first-fair, it may be, bursting up out of humanity and 
kindling hope in man’s possibilities ; who he is to be, 
and whether he is to be any Saviour of sinners at all, 
is the question perhaps to be decided. What is 
wanted, therefore, now, and silently called for, is the 
preaching of the fact-form Christ,—just such a Christ 
as the charities, and miracles, and fellow tendernesses, 
and death, and resurrection of Jesus put in outline be- 
fore us: God in Christ reconciling the world; he that 
could suffer, the just for the unjust, to bring us unto 
God; he that could endure enemies and came down 
from heaven to bear the curse of their bad lot to gain 
them; he that loved the poor and feared not the 
great; he that flavored the world by living in it; he 
that went through society and made his quickening, 
medicating power felt everywhere; he that has gone 
up to prepare mansions and to set his judgment seat 
for the world. O, if he could now be preached, as he 
might be and sometime will, what a cleaving to him 
would there be. And the supernatural glory of his 
life and works, instead of being an objection, would 
only kindle the greater fire. Men want the super- 
natural, after all, and even hunger for it, if only they 


94 THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE, 


can have it in its own self-evidence and concrete self- 
assertion, 
One thing more yet remains which must not be 
omitted. The very same reason that required the 
gospel to come in by the face of Jesus Christ, or to be 
impersonated by him, and get expression through his 
gentle emotions and the sanctities of his divine sor- 
row, holds good still, as before he went up to the Fa- 
ther. Weare always imagining that we want some 
better qualified advocacy—high preaching, sturdier 
argument on points of theology, better command of 
logical resources, more science, more fine rhetoric, 
more I know not what. No, the thing that we most 
| want is what we miss or lose out, in toiling after these 
| expected vanities, namely, a divine light in souls, the 
Tight of the knowledge of the glory of God in such 
/power as to light up faces. Come what will of 
) preaching, or come not what will not, the grand law 
of Christian power goes with faces. The gospel is 
nothing now, any more than it was at the first, unless 
it is reincarnated, and kept incarnate. It must get 
expression not through tongues and propositional 
wisdom, and the clatter of much argument, but 
through living persons, seen in all the phases of the 
better life they live. The real sermons are the great 
pure feelings, the generosities of holy sacrifice, the 
patience, the abiding with Christ in his sorrows, the 
worship of humility. By these every best preacher 
will preach his. best ; by these every humblest, most 
downtrodden believer will be the best preacher. Into 


THE GOSPEL OF THE FACE. 95 


this field then, one and all, God bids us come, and re- 
ceive the power from on high which came on the first 
disciples, and which comes on all, when the light of 
the knowledge of the glory of God shines in their 
faces and irradiates their persons. More briefly, gen- 
uine good living is the gospel, and that not because 
the man lives well as for himself but because he 
Lives—born into Life from above. 


V. 
JHE COMPLETING OF THE SOUL. 


“And ye are complete in him which is the head of all princi- 
pality and power.”—Col. 2: 10. 


Ir then we are only to be complete in Christ, the 
inference must be that we are incomplete without 
him. It follows in this view, or is rather a part of it, 
that a soul, after being made or created, is still to be 
completed. It may be a germ to be developed, or a 
blasted germ to be restored, or it may be both. In 
either view, it is not the full completed integer it was 
made to be. Here accordingly is the true work of 
Christ and his gospel. We may say, that he is here 
for the salvation, or, with equal truth, for the comple- 
tion of the soul. And this latter is now to be my 
subject ; viz.,* Zhe completing of the soul. 

We do not commonly speak in this way. Our man- 
ner is to regard the soul as God’s highest, noblest 
_ work, and we love to think of it as being even more 
complete than any thing else. But we do not ob- 
serve, that it is only the greater, or is seen to be, in 
the fact that so much is necessary to its completion. 
If it were some lower form of being, a rock, or a sea, 
or a sun, it could be struck out by a fiat of God, and 

(96) 


THE COMPLETING OF THE SOUL. 97 


be complete at the first; but being a moral nature to 
be unfolded by its own action into thought and char- 
acter and deific inspirations, and so into an eternal, 
self-afirming greatness and beauty, it must needs pass 
through great changes and lofty trainings after it is 
made, and in them be completed, as otherwise, or as 
being merely created, it was not and could not be. 

What then, following in this train, do we mean by 
the completing of the soul? how does it appear to 
need any such completion? and how is the fact ae 
complished ? 


Without putting the subject in this form, it is re- 
markable that we so readily and constantly assume the 
necessity of ‘a great after-work to be done upon the 
soul of our child, to make it the complete man or 
woman we desire it to be. Taken as being merely 
born, we look upon it as a barely embryonic life, the 
possibility or rudimental germ of a man, and nota 
man. What we call our child’s training, or education, 
is only our attempt to advance or bring him on to- 
wards completeness. He is to be instructed, we as- 
sume, corrected, governed, formed to self-government, 
unfolded in his intelligence, fashioned in his tastes, 
configured to principles of honor and truth. The re: 
sult is a being in higher quantity, dignity, and power, 
in a finer quality, and in a capacity, both of action 
and enjoyment, immensely enlarged. Could we look 
in upon the inner scenery of thought and working in 


two human creatures, one a wild, the other an educated 
9 


98 THE COMPLETING OF THE SOUL. 


man, how different should we perceive them to be in 
their apprehensions, currents of feeling, prejudices, 
superstitions, resentments, satisfactions, pleasures, 
causes of trouble, views of life, and thoughts of what 
is beyond. Neither will be really complete, but how 
different one from the other—he perhaps that was 


originally most gifted, how far inferior to the less — 


gifted. 

At the same time, it is not to be assumed that we 
are right in all our conceptions of what takes place in 
the education or training of minds. They will not be 
complete because they are full-educated in the intel- 
lectual sense. Sometimes they will in fact be ham- 
pered and stunted by their education, or even by what 
is considered to be their wonderful attainments in 
scholarship ; crippled in their inventiveness, drugged 
by the wisdoms of their great authorities, in that 
manner incapacitated by the overload they have 
taken. Perhaps one hour with God would have done 
more for the widening out of their consciousness, and 
the kindling of all divinest fires in their powers of 
thought and feeling, than many such whole years of 
drill in the schools. 

Sometimes we allow ourselves to think, that our 
child is going to be complete only when he is educated 
above and away from certain ranges of employment. 
We measure his completeness, perhaps, by the range 
for which we prepare him. If he can only be a 
blacksmith, or a tanner, or even a school-teacher, we 
perhaps think he is too little complete, and that we 


ee 


THE COMPLETING OF THE SOUL. 99 


have not made enough of him. Were he a qualified 
commander, banker, physician, lawyer, we should be 
better satisfied, and think him more nearly up to the 
measure of his possibilities. But God does not grade 
our completeness by any such law. He may have 
rated Bezaleel the brazier, far above Aaron the priest, 
and considered him to be a man far more nearly com- 
plete—I really suppose that he was. He has no such 
thought as that a blacksmith, or a tailor, or a shep- 
herd, or even a fisherman at his net, is of course a 
man incomplete, or at all less complete than if he 
were the light of a college. Who ever came nearer 
to being mated with Shakspeare than the tinker 
Bunyan? A great, growing, grandly unfolding soul, 
can be fashioned any-where, if only God is with him, 
and his faculty, it may be, will be completing itself, 
as truly in one employment as in another. His heart 
will grow as big, his imagination kindle itself in fires 
to him of as great beauty, he will be as original, as 
deep, as free, and will swing his nature into as high 
force every way, in using a hammer as in using a pen. 
He may not pass the scholarly conventionalities as 
well, but may pass the eternal dignities better. God 
nowhere allows, what we so constantly assume, that 
souls are kept back from their completeness, by their 
trades, and grades, and employments. He is going to 
complete them all, if they will suffer it, in the highest 
and most perfect form of being possible. In what 
manner, and by what means, will be shown hereafter. 
I only go thus far before my subject, in a way of en- 


a 


100 THE COMPLETING OF THE SOUL. 


larging and correcting our too insufficient, merely 
earthly conceptions of what the soul’s completion im- 
plies. No mere schooling, or human training, to 
whatever grade of life or social estimation it may 
raise, is any but the faintest approximation to a true 
completion of the soul. 


This now will appear more fully and determinately, 
as we go on to consider the supposed incompleteness, 
and show wherein it lies. If it were a question re- 
lating to the first man, Adam, in his lot of innocence, 
the answer would be more simple but far less evident. 
We should say, at once, that with all his perfect har- 
monies and beautiful instincts, he is yet unexercised, 
unformed, a full grown, beautiful child, but yet a 
child. That his perceptions are all to be gotten, his 
will to be trained, his habits formed, his memory 
stored, his love unfolded by its objects, his acquaint- 
ance with God practically matured, and all that con. 
stitutes a great and true wisdom learned. Until then 
he is an essentially incomplete creature; so incom- 
plete that he will not stand fast in good, but plunge 
himself into wrong, and all the unspeakable disasters 
of wrong. Indeed we shall begin to see that our first 
man, commonly thought to be so great and grandly 
perfect, is put on probation only that he may get his 
nature completed in knowledge and right habit, and 
so matured in good that he will come out able to 
stand. 

Our question, after this, relates to him partly under 


THE COMPLETING OF THE SOUL. 10] 


the conditions of moral disaster, into which he is 
fallen. We take the soul as it is, in our present moral 
state, and the moment we fasten our thought down 
squarely upon it, we see, by every sort of evidence 
crowding upon us, how very incomplete it is. 

In the first place it is universally conceded that it 
scarcely at all answers its true end. There might be 
some disagreement as to what that true end is. No 
matter ; whatever it be, there is a feeling everywhere, 
in every body, that there is something out of joint, and 
that souls are going wide of their mark in a thousand 
ways. Some call it sin, some call it circumstance, 
some mistake, some misdirection. Be that as it may, 
while the heavenly bodies keep their track to the 
thousandth part of a hair, and every great power of 
nature exactly performs its office, for some reason or 
other, souls go amiss, jerked out of their places and 
turned away from all conceivable ends. And the fact 
is proof, beyond a question, of their incompleteness. 
A watch is complete when it keeps time, not when it 
quarrels with all the notations of suns, and dials, and 
almanacs. A vintage process is complete when it 
makes wine, not when it makes vinegar. Souls in 
like manner are complete when they make the good 
they were made for, whatever it be, fulfilling exactly 
their glorious ends and uses. And as long as they 
fail of that, even in the least degree, they are of course 
incomplete. 

They are seen again to be incomplete, in the fact 
that their enjoyment is not full, but confessedly a 

9* 


102 THE COMPLETING OF THE SOUL. 


great way short of it. Their instincts are unfulfilled, 
their wants are unsupplied, their objects are not 
found. They seem to themselves to be living in con- 
fined quarters. They are hungry. They are tor- 
mented by a general unrest. It would not be so if 
they were complete. They would be exactly, abso- 
lutely full of enjoyment, just as by their sublime, in- 
born necessity they crave to be. When every thing is 
complete, all outreaching instincts are filled. No bee 
misses the shape of his cells, no bird of passage misses 
the direction of his flight, no plant aspiring towards 
the light misses the color and kind of its flower. No 
more will a soul, as being a creature set for joy, miss 
the state of absolutely full enjoyment, unless it is 
somehow incomplete, sweltering in some torment of 
negation, or inbred disorder. 

Souls again do not, as we know them, meet, or at 
all fulfill the standards of beauty, truth, and right. 
These are standards we all admit for souls, just as all 
fruits and flowers of nature have the standard figures 
and colors of their kind. An apple is not complete 
when it comes out a gourd. A rose is not complete 
when it comes forth blue or in a sandstone grey. An 
orange is not complete when it turns out a melon or a 
potato. What then does it signify, when a soul for- 
gets and misses its kind, when it puts forth itself in 
deformity, falsity, and wrong? Requiring itself all 
exactest and most perfect beauty, all divinest truth 
and right, and having these for the standard of its 
kind, how comes it thus to be turned off, into all abor- 


THE COMPLETING OF THE SOUL. 103 


tions of kind—evidently, confessedly, nay even uni- 
versally falling away from itself and its own high 
nature? Just so far is it incomplete, and there is no 
other answer to be given. 

Take another and more entirely surface view of 
mankind, and let the question settle itself, as it will 
inevitably, under mere first impressions. Why then 
is it, and how, that so much meanness, trickishness, 
oppression, unregulated and wild passion, self-corro- 
sion, painfulness, bitterness, distraction, are found in 
the world? How is it that no soul is able to assert 
the power of self-government, steadily and stiffly 
enough to keep itself in harmony? Or if we look 
away at society and the outward relations of persons, 
how is it that they are in so many quarrels, and com- 
plaints of wrong, and suits of redress, so continually 
plagued by acts of injustice and robbery and fraud, 
tormented by so many resentments, scorched by so 
many hatreds, weeping so much, bleeding so often, 
dying on so vast a scale, by a really criminal careless- 
ness in the use of their machineries, or by the skillful, 
scientific use of machineries and armies gotten up to 
kill? What can we think, looking on such facts, but 
that human souls are under some terrible dispossession 
that crazes their action? Who can even imagine 
them to be creatures complete in their order? To put 
the whole matter under the eye, in a very comprehen- 
sible example, suppose all the grains in a bushel of 
wheat were to commence acting in themselves, and 
towards and upon one another, in just the same man- 


104 THE COMPLETING OF THE SOUL. 


ner as souls are seen to be doing in the specifications 
just made, what a bushel of tumult would it be! how 
wild, and hot, and fierce the little stir so many mal- 
contents would make, whirling one another out of the 
measure, and finally burning up the measure itself. 
The only reason why such kernels of wheat do not 
behave in this way, is that they are every one com- 
plete creatures, resting in their own perfect mold, and 
in quiet harmony with each other—they that are at 
the top lying just as heavily, and they that are at the 
bottom supporting the weight just as bravely as they 
must. Souls completed in their order would do the 
same, just as all God’s finished worlds and societies in 
glory are able to do, without one rasping of bad 
thought, or pang of mutual accusation. 

Take another kind of illustration still. We have a 
way of saying, how often, concerning this or that 
man, that he is a ruined man, or we take a different 
figure and say, that he is a man blasted by his vices or 
his moral distempers ; in which we refer mentally to 
the incomplete state of the flower, or the germ setting 
in the flower, which we say is blasted when it does not 
come to fruit. And the figure is rightly chosen. 
These men so blasted are incomplete men, men in the 
process of being completed, which they never in fact 
are or can be. And so in the awful desolations of 
talent, power, liberty, and hope, we see about us— 
strewing the world under the heavens, as the blasted 
germs the ground under a tree—we have just so many 
proofs that man who can not fully and completely be, 


THE COMPLETING OF THE SOUL. 105 


perishes so miserably, because he can not bear the ex- 
periment. 

I must name yet one other evidence of the incom- 
pleteness of souls, which, though apprehended by few, 
will be to such as it reaches most convincing of all. 
It is a very curious and remarkable distinction of souls 
that, being finite, they have yet infinite wants and as- 
pirations; their very longing is to be somehow cleared 
of all bounds or completed in the outspreading of 
some infinite possession. And this, I think, however 
extravagant it may seem, is the exact and sober im- 
port of their problem in life. They are creatures to 
be somehow infinited, to be eternized in their contin- 
uance of good, to have all truth, to possess all things 
and wield all power, as completely as if it were theirs, 
and reign with a supreme will, having every thing 
done just as if it were, or as in fact Leing, from their 
own will and counsel. To this end their instinct runs, 
and stops not any where short of it. They are so 
made as to be possibly completed, only as they take pos- 
session of the infinite—just as in God they may, and as 
it is the sublime purpose of our gospel that they shall. 
What a falling short, therefore, is it, when they 
fall short of God. In their love they were to possess 
him ; in their self-centered, bitterly stringent littleness, 
they tear themselves away ; and the result is that their 
soul, which wants to fly all boundaries, shrivels to a 
point and only aches, where it should joyfully spread 
itself on boundless good, and in that element begin to 
reign. 


106 THE COMPLETING OF THE SOUL. 


But if souls are so far incomplete, as by manifold 
tokens we see, we have it as a matter next in point te 
find, how in Christ they can be made complete. And 
here we shall discover three great powers and agencies 
provided for this purpose. 

1. Inspirations. Separated from God, man dwin- 
dles to a mere speck, he is nothing. He was made to 
have magnitude and be in flood, by having great in- 
spirations roll under him and through him. Existing 
therefore in mere selfhood, he can not push himself 
out any way to be complete as from himself. A 
sponge might as well complete itself out of the sea, in 
dry mid air. It must have the sea, it must let in and 
possess the sea—all the currents, and tides, and even 
the salt of it—drinking and swaying, and feeding in 
its element, and then, as being sea-like in its habit, it 
fulfills its kind and is complete. Just so a soul must 
have all God’s properties and perfections flowing in 
and through—liberty and life in his life, power in 
his power, counsel in his counsel. It must be true in 
his truth, righteous in his righteousness, secure in his 
security. That is, it must have the Infinite Life, 
which it was originally made for, flowing through it, 
and wafting in upon it, all the divine properties that 
feed and freshen, empower and impel, a really great 
and complete nature. It only gasps till the infinite 
touches it, and then it lives. 

Now it is this everlasting inspiration-force that 
Christ arranges for, and promises in the gift of the 
Spirit. He enters the soul to fill out every lack, and 


THE COMPLETING OF THE SOUL. 107 


every secret fault, knowing it all through, with a most 
subtle and perfect knowledge. He communicates, im- 
breathes, sheds abroad himself, configuring it in- 
wardly to all that is most perfect in himself. He does 
it by a working in the nature of inspiration, not put- 
ting the will on forming this or that particular trait 
for itself, but by flooding and floating it on towards 
this or that, by his own divine motion, turning its 
yery liberty towards all it wants and needs to receive. 
These inspirations are to be currents running exactly 
where it requires to be carried, and it is just as if 
every ship in the sea were to have a Gulf Stream 
given specially to it, running the exact course of its 
voyage, and drifting it on to its port. The inspira- 
tions are all perfect,*they are adequate, exact, and 
steady, so that no completest issue may be missed. 
Then again— 

2. We have ideas and ideals in Christ, who lives 
God in the human figure and relation, so that when 
we think him as a person, or take hold of him in be- 
lief, we have the exact figure in our feeling of what 
requires to be fashioned and completed in us. We 
not only have inspirations thus from behind, as we just 
now saw, but we have ideals before us to kindle inspi- 
rations in our eyes; so that while we could not even con- 
ceive any such perfect form of character, item by item, 
we can yet be fashioned by it, as a whole displayed to 
our love, in the living, loving person of our Master. 
We have nothing to do but to be in the Spirit, and 
keep ourselyes in Christ’s dear walk and company, 


108 THE COMPLETING OF THE SOUL. 


and we shall be set on surely and constantly, towards 
the completeness required. Christ is the mirror that 
glasses God’s image before us, and the Spirit is the 
plastic force within, that transfers and photographs 
that image; and so, beholding as in a glass the glory 
of the Lord, we are changed into the same image 
from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the 
Lord. 

Then once more— 

3. To-make the provision perfect, we are set in a 
wonderfully various scheme of relations, that we 
may have a training in duties, qualities, virtues, 
equally various, and be perfected in them and by 
means of them. Nothing could be done by setting us 
to the fashioning and finishing of a character, con- 
ceived by ourselves to be complete. We are too 
coarse and clumsy and halfseeing to even form the 
notion of a nobly complete excellence ; the only way 
is to put us milling in rounds of duty, and drill, and 
sacrifice, wherein we shall be trained to completeness 
without conceiving it. And we have it as our remark- 
able advantage in Christ and the faith that seals our 
unity with him, that we have him as the perfect di- 
vine man with us in all these manifold human condi- 
tions. And we go into relation with our fellows, hay- 
ing him in company. We admire him, and by our 
love he is copied into us, when it is not our particular 
intent to copy him. We see how he lives for man- 
kind, and we make common cause with him, in the 
practice of a like self-sacrifice. All our human rela- 


, 


‘ 


bas 


THE COMPLETING OF THE SOUL. 109 


tions in this way become a drill of occasions. And 
we are to get an experience in these relations, that is 
both corrective and creative. In our relations to the 
church and the ministry of the word; in our rela- 
tions to the state and to public law; in our relations 
to the schools ; in our relations to the family, where 
age, and sex, and fatherhood, and motherhood, and 
wifehood, and husbandhood, and childhood, and fam- 
ily property, and family want, and ten thousand other 
things are concerned; in our relations of business, 
and debt, and credit, and hire, and employment; in 
our relations of neighborhood and society ; in our re- 
lations with unbelievers, neglectors, irreligious, unre- 
ligious, them that go to public worship, and them that 
do not; in our relations to the poor and the rich, to 
superiors and to inferiors, to friends, and flatterers, 
and enemies, and such as do us wrong—in all these 
multiformities, which no inventory can. exhaust, we 
are put on just as many multiformities of duty and 
experience, so that trying to do the exact Christly 
thing in them all, we are to get benefit in so many 
forms and degrees, and be brought on thus at last, 
when all is done and suffered, to a real and full com- 
pleteness in the will of God. In this wondrous mill, 
this laboratory of training, every blemish is to be re- 
moved, and the soul cut into form, after the similitude 
of a palace, polished as it were sapphire, sharpened as 
the point of a diamond. There will at last be no 
spot or wrinkle left, or any such thing. It will be 
washed, whitened, made clean, all glorious without, 
10 


110 THE COMPLETING OF THE SOUL. 


all beautiful within, a divinely gifted creature, com- 
plete and perfect in God’s own image forever—ready 
for the enjoyment of God in all his sacrifices, beati- 
tudes, benedictions, and judgments; ready for all 
God’s future, and to have that future as its own. 


This now as I conceive is the real completeness of 
man. And the impression into which we are inevita- 
bly brought, is that religion, the gospel and graces of 
the Lord Jesus Christ, are the only power that is able 
to bring man forward into the principal intents and 
highest summits of his nature. 

As already intimated, we try education, getting 
much from it, but never any thing which even ap- 
proaches the standard of completeness.* Meantime, 
we perfectly know that we only run the risk in it of 
making a small misery more miserable, and a small 
incapacity a greater, fearfully damaged incapacity. 
Nothing is completed by it, rounded out, and put at 
rest in good. In what we call selfimprovement, a 
great deal more is attempted, because the endeavor is 
to cover the whole ground of the moral and religious 
nature. But if there is no cultivation of God or of 
Christ within, no inspirations moving, the work is a 
poor, desultory affair, polishing one thing, while an- 
other more important goes rough by neglect; and 
the result is, finally, that the great self-improvement 
issues in a great self-consciousness, painful to behold ; 
a self-pleased finish of patch-work painfully made up, 

*Y. 0. C. 


THE COMPLETING OF THE SOUL. 111 


and destitute of all great liberty. -Also, to itself, how 
dry! . 

We try self-government and self-regulation under 
the standards of morality, but the most we obtain or 
accomplish is to pile up what we think good acts on 


one another, as some day’s man might the cents of his 


wages, but they will even be as dry as cents, with as 
little continuity in the pile. There is no life either in 
the acts or in ourselves. O if there be any thing 
tedious beyond measure, it is the legality method, 
going after a total of merit to be gotten up in our- 
selves, by good acts singly and persistently done. It 
would even choke a saint, much more a sinning man. 

There is also another more superlative way which is 
greatly praised and magnified, and is therefore much 
aspired to by some, I mean philosophy. But the 
ideals raised in this discipline, will be forever outrun- 


ning the possible attainments, and the fine philosophic 


consciousness will be only a kind of equilibrium under 
dryness and felt limitation; a bitter kind of wisdom 
whose quiet is the assumed quiet only of a mind with- 
holden from all highest truth, and bending itself down 
upon its own low thoughts and opinions. The wars 
of the mind, its disorders and dissatisfactions, are ken- 
neled perhaps under what is called the philosophy, but 
not composed. 

There is nothing in short but religion, or the life in 
God, that can be looked to for the completion of a 
soul. And it has three great advantages that differ it 
from every thing else. (1.) That it takes hold of the 


112 THE COMPLETING OF THE SOUL. 


soul’s eternity and its sin, to raise up, harmonize, in- 
wardly purify, glorify and settle it, in a rest of ever- 
lasting equilibrium in God. (2.) That it takes hold 
of all possible conditions and callings, completing as 
truly the menial as the employer, the bondman as the 
master, the unlettered as the scholar, the man that is 
grimed by labor as the man of leisure or the monk in 
his cell. (8.) That it completes one degree of ca- 
pacity as certainly as another, preparing even the fee- 
blest to fill out its measure as roundly and blissfully 
as the highest. 

Such is religion, the great all-formative grace for 
man. Nothing but this can even dare to promise any 
fit completion of humanity. All the harmonies, all 
the great inspirations, all the immovable and immor- 
tal confidences, all the contacts of infinity and seals of 
infinite possessorship are here. And yet, after all, 
how impossible is it, when we show all this, to get 
by the feeling of men not religious, that there is 
something humiliating in religion? What absurdity! 
what pitiable unreason! Meligion humiliating to 
men! Religion a humiliation not to be endured! O 
my friends, if it be so with you, if you have so far 
lost the proportions of reason, that you can see noth- 
ing to respect and draw, in the becoming a really 
complete soul, there is nothing I am sure that can 
ever beget a right mind in you, but to go apart and 
listen for the secret monitions of God. Who but he 
can ever set in truth, over a barrier of false pride so 
irrational and so unaccountably blind. 


THE COMPLETING OF THE SOUL. 113 


Some of you, I know, have better thoughts, and yet 
have many great struggles with your own remaining 
disorders. You are mortified often, you sometimes half 
despair of yourselves. Be it so, you had best despair 
of yourselves; for you can not complete yourselves, 
and can only fail when you undertake it. But the 
more incompetent you seem to be, the more fatally 
mixed up with disorder and sin, the more glorious it is 
that Christ, the complete man, the only complete man 
that ever trod the earth, is with you. Him therefore 
you are to follow, in his brotherhood to walk. Being 
complete in himself, all that you are apprehended for 
he knows, and will help you to attain. Enough! 
enough! blessed is the assurance. But ye are washed, 
but ye are sanctified, but ye are glorified in the name 
of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God— 
complete in him who is the head of all principality 
and power. O the grand conception of that world we 
have before us, that it is to be made up of men ever- 
lastingly complete! God grant that we may every one 
be there. 

10* 


Vi. 
THE IMMEDIATE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 


“ For some have not the knowledge of God.”—1 Cor. 15: 34. 


Wnuo then are these Corinthian disciples, that they 
have not so much as the knowledge of God? Plainly 
enough our apostle is not charging them here with ig- 
norance, but with some lack of the divine illumination 
which ought, if they are true disciples, to be in them. 
They certainly know God in the traditional and merely 
cognitive way. Indeed the apostle is discoursing to 
them here of the resurrection of the dead, which is 
itself a matter based in Christian ideas. Besides, he 
adds, “I speak this to your shame ;” haying it in view 
that they are not Pagans, but so far informed, as dis- 
ciples, that they ought to know God in a way more 
interior. . 

We shall best understand the point assumed in this 
impeachment, I think, if we raise the distinction be- 
tween knowing God, and knowing about God. Doubt- 
less, it is much to know about God, about his opera- 
tions, his works, his plans, his laws, his truth, his perfect 
attributes, his saving mercies. This kind of knowl- 
edge is presupposed in all faith, and constitutes the 
rational ground of faith, and so far is necessary even 

(114) 


THE IMMEDIATE KNOWLEDGE OF Gop. 115 


to salvation. But true faith itself discovers another 
and more absolute kind of knowledge, a knowledge of 
God himself; immediate, personal knowledge, coming 
out of no report, or statement, or any thing called 
truth, as being taught in language. It is knowing | 
God within, even as we know ourselves. The other is _ 
only a knowing about God, as from a distance. To 
put this matter of the immediate knowledge of God 
in its true doctrinal position, it may be well to say, 
that we have two denials set against it, both as 
nearly fatal as need be to any such possibility.* 
One is the denial of the philosophers outside of Chris- 
tianity, speculating there about the cognitive functions, 
and making what they conceive to be their specially 
profound discovery, that knowledges are possible only 
of things relative. Therefore, God being infinite, can 
not be known—God is unknowable. They say 
nothing of faith, they have no conception of any such 
super-eminent, almost divine talent in our humanity, 
shut up or drawn away from God by our sin—an im- 
mediate sensing power, to which God may be as truly 
known, as we know the distinct existence of objects 
perceived by the eyes. Could they simply trust them- 
selves over to God, to live by his tender guidance and 
true inward revelation, they would never again call 
him the unknowable. Meantime, there will be many 
children of sorrow, unlearned and simple, who will. 
easily know the God they have it as their point of 
philosophy to show can not any way be known! This 
Bee CnC: 


116 THE IMMEDIATE 


most false and feeble doctrine of negation, I do not feel 
called upon to discuss—it will die of inanity sooner 
than it can by argument. 

The other and second form of denial as regards the 
immediate knowledge of God, sets up its flag inside 
of the Christian church and among the muniments of 
doctrine. Here the possibility of faith is admitted, 
and the necessity of it abundantly magnified. But 
the faith power is used up, it is conceived, on proposi- 
tions; that is propositions which affirm something 

__about God. It does not go through, and over, and be- 
__ yond, such propositions, to meet the inward revelation 
or discovery of God himself. The accepted doctrine 
is that we know, or can know God, only so far as 
we know something about him, no immediate knowl- 
edge of him being at all possible, or even conceivable. 
The continually reiterated assumption is that never, 
in our most sacred, dearest, deepest moments of holy 
experience, do we get beyond being simply acted on 
by certain truths we know about God. And when 
men are called to God, saying, “ Come unto me,” 
they understand the meaning to be, that they are 
called only to believe something about him put in 
words, and work their feeling or their faith by what 
the words supply. They do not even conceive it as a 
possibility, that we should know God himself as a 
presence operative in us; even as we know the sum- 
mer heat by its pervasive action in our bodies. We 
do not know the heat by report, or debate, or infer- 
ence, or scientific truth interpreting medially between 


KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. RG 


as and it; we do not see it, or hear it, or handle it, 
and yet we have it and know that we have, by the in- 


ward sense it creates. So in what is called the Chris- « 


tian regeneration, our being born of God implies the 
immediate revelation of God within—all which these 
teachers can not so understand, but imagine that we 
are born of something about God rather; that is of 
truths, affirmations, notions, working medially or in- 
strumentally between us and God. 

What then is the truth in this matter? Why. it is 
that human souls, or minds are just as truly made to 
be filled with God’s internal actuating presence, as 
human bodies are to be tempered internally by heat, 
or as matter is made to be swayed by gravity, or the 
sky-space to be irradiated by the day. God is to 
them heat, gravity, day, immediately felt as such, and 
known by the self-revelation of his person. So at 
least it was originally to be, and so it would be now, 

had not this presence of God internally and personally 
to souls, this quickening, life-giving God-sense, been 
shut off by sin. For by this they tear themselves 
away from God, and become self-centered, separated 
creatures, even as growths in a cavern, or as fishes on 
the land, having no longer that immediate knowledge 
of God which is their normal state of subsistence. 
Heneeforth they know or may know, much about 
God, but they do not know God. They are shut up 
as to God, dark to God, except, as by the head, they 
may think, discover, learn, or reason something about 
him. Never do they know him till he becomes cen- 


118 THE IMMEDIATE 


tered in their soul again as its life, and the crowning 
good and blessing of its eternity. And this is fitly 
called being born of God, because it is the entering of 
God again into his place—to be the beginning there 
of a new movement and life derivative from him, and 
fed by the springs of his fullness in the heart. Which 
entering in of God supposes, in fact, a new discovery 
of God. Not that the subject is put back now into a 
new cognitive relation; his cognitive function is no-’ 
wise altered, and if there were no other, would still be 
as blind to God as before. The new discovery made 
is made by faith, opening the heart to receive, and 
in receiving feel or inwardly sense, what should 
have been the original and always normal reyela- 
tion. 

Is it then to be said or imagined that, in this new 
birth, or new-begun life of faith, the subject really 
knows God by an immediate knowledge? Hemay not 
so conceive it, I answer, but it is none the less true. 
He will speak, it may be, only of his peace, but it will 
seem to him to bea kind of divine peace. He will 
testify that God is wondrously near to him, and he 
will put into that word near something like a sense of 
Him. He will be conscious and will say that he is, 
of a strangely luminous condition, as if his whole body, 
in the words of Christ, were full of light; and all the 
scripture terms that set forth God as a light, and a 
sun, and a power opposite to darkness, will come in, 
as it were, to answer, and to interpret the force of his 
experience. Still he will not conceive, it may be, of 


KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 119 


any such thing as that the peace, the nearness, «he 
luminousness of his soul, supposes an immediate knowl- 
edge of God now discovered to him. He may even 
disown such a conception, as implying a kind of irrev- 
erence. Nevertheless that is the exact verdict of his 
experience, and nothing else can at all give the mean- 
ing of it. Indeed, if we can believe it, he was made 
originally to be even conscious of God and live eter- 
nally in that kind of immediate knowledge; which 
design is now beginning, for the first time, to be ful- 
filled. 

Thus you have every one two kinds of knowledge 
relating to yourself. One is what you know mediately 
about yourself, through language, and one that which 
you have immediately as being conscious of yourself. 
Under the first you learn who your parents were, what 
others think of you, what effects the world has on 
you, what power you have over it, and what is 
thought to be the science,it may be,of your nature, as 
an intelligent being. Under the second you havea 
knowledge of yourself so immediate, that there is no 
language in it, no thought, no act of judgment or 
opinion, you simply have a se/ffeeling that is intuitive 
and direct. Now you were made to have just such _ 
an immediate knowledge of God as of yourself; to be 
conscious of God; only this consciousness of God has 
been closed up by your sin and is now set open by 
your faith ; and this exactly is what distinguishes every 
soul enlightened by the Spirit, and born of God. 
Whether he says it or not, this is the real account of 


120 THE IMMEDIATE 


his experience, that God is now revealed in him, and 
that he begins to be conscious of God ; for it is a fact, 
as every soul thus enlightened will testify, that he is 
now conscious, not of himself only, but of a certain 
otherness moving in him ; some mysterious power of good 
that is to him what he is not to himself, a spring of 
new-born impulse, a living of new life. It is not that 
he sees God without by the eye, any more than that 
he sees himself without by the eye, when he is con- 
scious of himself; it is not that he has any mind-view 
of God awakened in him any more than that he has 
in consciousness a mind-view of himself. It is only 
that he has the sense of a sublime other not himself; 
a power, a life, a transcendently great, felt Other— 
_who is really and truly God. Hence the rest, and 
strength, and peace, and luminous glory into which he 
is born—it is nothing but the revelation of God and 
the immediate knowledge of God. Probably enough 
he will not say this, not haying been trained or accus- 
tomed to this mode of conceiving the change, but he 
will say that God is near, wonderfully, gloriously near, 
and will press into the word all nearness possible, even 
such as to include in fact the felt consciousness of 
God, and the immediate knowledge of his pres- 
ence. 

Observe now in what manner the Scriptures speak 
on this subject. And the time would fail me to 
merely recount the ways in which it is given as the 
distinction of faith or holy experience, that it carries, 
in some way, the knowledge of God, and differs the 


KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 121 


subject in that manner from all that are under the 
blindness of mere nature. 

Discoursing thus, for example, of the state of love, 
if distinguishes that state as being one, in which God 
and God’s love are actually revealed in the soul—* For 
love is of God, and every one that loveth is born of 
God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth 
not God, for God is love.” And accordingly there 
was never a soul on earth that being born into the 
great principle and impulse of self-sacrificing love, did 
not have the sense of God in it, and consciously live, 
in some mysterious participation of him. 

The Holy Spirit, in like manner, is spoken of in a 
great many ways, as the intercoursing life and imme- 
diate inward manifestation of God. Thus he is said 
to ‘‘ witness with our spirit,” which means that there 
is to be a consciousness raised of his presence in the 
soul, and a sense of reciprocity established by what is 
called his witnessing with us; as if he carried him- 
self into our feeling in a way of internal dialogue. 
So there is a discerning of the Spirit spoken of, which 
does not mean a reasoning out, but an immediate 
knowing of the mind of the Spirit. Christ also de- 
clares when promising the Spirit, that the world 
seeth him not, neither knoweth him, but ye know 
him, for he dwelleth with you and shall be in you.” 
And in immediate connection—“ the world seeth me 
no more, but ye see me—[know me, that is, in him.] 
At that day ye shall know that I am in the Father, 
and ye in me andJ in you.” And then again—* He 

11 


122 THE IMMEDIATE 


that loveth me shall be loved of my father, and I wili 
love him, and will manifest myself unto him.” 
And what is manifestation but immediate knowl- 
edge ? 

This new consciousness of God is plainly declared 
by the apostle when he says—* That Christ may 
dwell in your hearts by faith, that ye, being rooted and 
grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all 
saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and 
height, and to know the love of Christ which passeth 
_ knowledge; that ye might be filled with all the full- 
ness of God.” What language but this, “ to know the 
love that passeth knowledge,” to have revealed in 
conscious participation what can not be known or 
measured by the notions of the cognitive understand- 
ing—what but this can fitly express the sacred visita- 
tion of a Christian soul, when through Christ and the 
Spirit it is wakened again to the eternal conscious- 
ness of God. 

O this wonder of discovery, the knowledge of God— 
who can find words for it, or the change it must needs 
make! It even makes the soul another creature to 
itself. Now it is no more blank to God, tortures 
itself no more in guesses dim, sighs no more—‘O 
that I knew where I might find him.” It has recoy- 
ered, as it were, the major part of existence that be- 
fore was lost; it knows not only itself, but it has the 
knowledge of God; and in that fact it is raised out of 
its mere finite speck of magnitude, into the conscious 
participation of being infinite. Every thing is now be 


KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 123 


come luminous. Old things are passed away, behold 
all things are become new—great as new, and holy as 
great, and blessed as holy. 

But there is an objection to this mode of conceiy- 
ing holy experience, as implying an immediate dis- 
covery of God, which I am properly required to no- 
tice. What is the use, in this view, some will ask, of 
a Bible, or external revelation? what use of the incar- 
nation itself? Are not these advances on our outward 
knowledge superseded and made useless, when we 
conceive that God is offered to immediate knowledge 
or experience? In one view they are, and in another 
they are not. Does it follow that because we have an 
immediate knowledge of heat, we have therefore no 
use at all for the scientific doctrine of heat, or the 
laws by which it is expounded? Suppose it is a part 
of our interest in this article of heat, that we be able 
to generate more of it, or use it differently and with 
better economy. So far we have a use in knowing 
about heat, as well as knowing heat. In the same way 
it is of immense consequence to know every thing pos- 
sible about God, that we may find how the more per- 
fectly to know God. We want, in this manner, the 
whole Scripture, and not least the incarnation and the 
cross, and the story of the pentecost. These things 
are matters given to us about ‘God, for the very pur- 
pose of showing us how to find God. The inherent 
use of all medial knowledges, all truths, cognitions, 
books, appearings, and teachings, is that they bring 
us in, to know God by an immediate knowledge. Se 


124 THE IMMEDIATE 


far I would give most ready assent to the Quaker doe 
| trine. We are never to put the book between us and 
God, to give us second-hand knowledges of him, and 
there accept our-limit. The book is given us to carry 
us beyond the book, and put us in the way of finding 
God as others have found him; then and there to be in 
the Spirit as they were, and know Him by such pri- 
vate interpretation as he will give us. The mine is 
given, not that we may have the gold already dug, 
but that we may go a mining for ourselves. And as 
these great saints of holy scripture were men of like 
passions with us, it is to be our glorious privilege that 
they pilot us on, by telling us how to know and grow 
as they did. 

There is also another objection to be noticed here, 
which moves in the exactly opposite direction, where 
those who know not God complain that revelation, as 
they look upon it, does not reveal him, and that God 
is dark to them still, as they could not expect him to 
be. If there be a God, they ask, why does he not 
stand forth and be known as a Father to his children ? 
Why allow us to grope, and stumble after him, or 
finally miss him altogether? They are not satisfied 
with the Bible, and if we call it a revelation of God, 
they do not see it. Why should he be so difficult of 
discovery, hid in recesses so deep, and only doubtfully 
and dimly known? If there be a God, is he not of 
such consequence, that being hid is even a wrong? Is 
it not also the right most plainly of every human 
creature, to have an easy and free knowledge of him ? 


eee 


KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 125 


I certainly think it is; only we must not make him 
responsible for the blear and self-blinding of our sin. 
And if it were not for this, I think we should all see 
him plainly enough, and always, and every where. 
For it is the whole endeavor of his management to be 
known. He not only meets our understanding pro- 
cesses in the facts of his Bible, but he offers himself to 
be known without any process at all, just as the light 
is; nay, if we will have it so, to be a kind of second 
consciousness in us, and be known to us even as we 
know ourselves. He is even pressing himself into 
knowledge when our eyes are shut—in our self-will, 
our hate, our denial, our desolation. O that for one 
hour you could have the ingenuous mind that is 
needed to really give him welcome! No more, after 
that, would you complain of him that he withdraws 
from your knowledge. 


Now this exposition of God’s truth, here brought to 
a close, converges practically, as I conceive, on a 
single point of broadest consequence ; correcting a 
mistake almost universally prevalent in some greater 
or less degree; the mistake I mean of being over- 
much occupied in religion with matters of the head. 
The true evidence of discipleship is knowing God. 
Other men know something about him. The Chris- 
tian knows him, has him as a friend. And there is no 
substitute for this. Observances, beliefs, opinions, 
self-testing severities—all these are idle and prove 
nothing. If a man knows God, it is a fact so grand, 

att 


126 THE IMMEDIATE 


so full of meaning, that he wants no evidence beside. 

All curious explorations and deep searches in this mat- 

ter are very much as if a man were trying himself 

—~ carefully, to find whether he sees the day. If a man 
knows God in the revelation of his Son, he is zpso 
facto full, and wants no more. Therefore he should 
not even begin to be elaborate in his self-testings, or 

__his questions about himself; the sign is a bad one. 
When the true day hath dawned, and the day-star 
hath risen in the heart, the man himself ought to 
know it without much trouble. Let thine eye be 
single, serve God, seek God, know God only, and thy 
whole body shall be full of light. 

Now as these keep off the light of their day, by the 
ever-busy meddling of their understanding, there is 
another class who have never found the day by reason 
of their over-busy, over-curious endeavors to make 
ready for it. They are waiting, and reading, and rea- 
soning, as they think, to get light for conversion. 
They are going to be converted rationally, nursing all 
the while a subtle pride of this, which only makes 
them darker, and puts them farther off. They quite 
misconceive the relation of our previous opinions, 
knowledges, and wisdoms, to the state of faith or con- 
version; and putting themselves down upon these, 
they are all the while at work, as they think, grading a 
road into the kingdom of God, so that when the road 
is done, they expect to be steered straight in, guided by, 
and rested on, the rails they have now finally laid 
down. But there is, alas! a great gulf of transition 


KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 127 


here to be passed, that forbids eternally any such con- 
ceit as that. There is no such relation between the 
knowing about God and knowing God, as they think 
there is. All the speculative preparations made, and 
roads of knowledge graded, stop inevitably short of | 
the kingdom, and whoever imagines that he is going 
to be trundled logically along the plane of his notional 
wisdoms and arguments, into God’s bosom, will as- 
suredly find that he is not there, but has fallen in- 
finitely short of it. What then, must you drop out 
your very intelligence in order to become a Christian ? 
Far from that as possible; you are only required to 
use your intelligence intelligently. That is, perceiv- 
ing that all you know, debate and think about God is, 
at best, only introductory to the knowledge of God 
himself, and some way off, take care rather to let 
go your speculations and open your heart in faith 
to the true manifestation of God. After all you 
_have reasoned, faith is still to come. The roads 
of the natural understanding are in a lower plane, 
you must rise, you must go up into trust and know 
God—God himself—by the inward discovery of his in- 
finite spirit and person. 

What is wanted, therefore, for us all, is summed 
up in this Christian word faith—faith in Christ, or 
faith in God; for it makes no difference. Thinking »~ 
and questioning stir the mind about God, faith 
discerns him, and by it, as the soul’s open window, 
he enters to be discerned. Would that all of you — 
could know how much this means. Cease then 


128 THE IMMEDIATE KNOWLEDGE, ETC. 


from your questions, all ye that are afar off, not 
knowing God, and asking sometimes, with a sigh, 
where shall we find him? Know that he is here. 
in thy mouth and in thy heart; only believe in 
him, and you shall know the greatest bliss a soul 
ean know, the Father of all glory, manifest within. 


VER. 


RELIGIOUS NATURE, AND RELIGIOUS 
CHARACTER. 


“That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, 
and find him, though he be not far from every one of us.”—Acts 17: 27. 

SometmeEs a truth or distinction of the greatest con- 
sequence will come into expression in a writer’s lan- 
guage, when he does not notice it, or is not particularly 
aware of it himself. Thus Paul, in his notable speech 
here to the men of Athens, drops out, unawares to 
himself, in the form of his language, a most accurately 
- drawn distinction that is of the highest possible conse- 
quence. In passing through their city, and beholding 
their devotions, he had been strangely affected by find- 
ing, among others, an altar to the Unknown God. That 
was the type, in a sense, of all their idolatries. In 
them all, impelled by a natural instinct for religion, 
they were ignorantly worshiping; wanting a God, 
and feeling after him, but not able to find him. And 
yet he is not hidden, wants to be found, orders every 
thing to bring them to himself. 

This expression, “ feel after,” has a mental reference 
plainly enough to what they, as God’s blind offspring, 
were doing ; and the expression, “find him,” to what 
God, never afar off, wants to have them do. In one, 

(129) 


130 RELIGIOUS NATURE, 


the deep longings of a nature made for God and relig- 
ion is recognized ; in the other, a satisfied state of holy 
discovery and rest in God. 

What I propose, accordingly, at the present time, is 
to unfold, if I can, the profoundly real and practically 
wide distinction here suggested, between having a relig- 
tous nature, and being in a religious life; or, what in fact 
is the same, between feeling after God, and finding him. 

In proposing this distinction, it may be important to 
say, that I do it with deliberate reference to what ap- 
pears to be a great religious danger of our time. It 
used to be the common doctrine of sermons, as many 
of you will remember, that mankind, under sin, have 
really no affinity for God left. Total depravity was 
made total, in such a sense as to leave in the soul no 
receptivity for God whatever. Human nature itself, it 
was declared, is opposition. to God; able, therefore, 
only to be the more exasperated in its opposition, the 
nearer God is brought. Instead of having still a relig- 
ious nature, it seemed to be supposed that we have 
rather an anti-religious nature, and that nothing can 
be done for us or by us till a new nature is given. 

All which now is virtually gone by. We familiarly 
recognize now the fact of a religious nature still left, 
hungering and heaving in us, and beginning oft to be 
in want; longings after the divine, however sup- 
pressed by the overmastering tides of evil and vain de- 
sire. The soul, we believe and acknowledge, has a 
sensibility to good and to God, able to be drawn by 
Christ, lifted up, capable thus of being recovered to 


AND RELIGIOUS CHARACTER. 131 


holiness without being literally new-created in it. 
And the result is what might well enough be expect- 
ed. Where before, the soul, heaving and hungering 
and often much disturbed, was battered and beaten 
down by the huge impossibility of religion,—dumbed 
even to prayer, and kept in stern dead-lock, waiting 
for the arrival of God’s omnipotence to remove the op- 
position of nature, and give the new heart of grace— 
we are passing out rather now into a kind of holiday 
freedom, talking piety as a natural taste, enjoying our 
fine sentiments of reverence to God, and protesting our 
great admiration of Christ and his beautiful lessons,— _ 
all in the plane of nature itself. Multitudes of us, and ~ 
especially of the young, congratulate ourselves that we 
are about as good Christians, on the ground of mere 
natural sentiment, as need be. Nay, we are somewhat 
better Christians than there used to be, because we are 
more philanthropic, better reformers, and in that are 
so easily up to the level of Christianity, in a fashion of 
piety so much more intelligent. Our doctrine of the 
gospel grows flashy, to a large extent, in the same 
manner. High sentiments, beautiful aspirations, are 
taken, sometimes wittingly and sometimes unwittingly, 
as amounting to at least so much of religious charac- 
ter. Where we shall be landed, or stranded rather, in 
this shallowing process, is too evident. Christianity 
will be coming to be more and more nearly a lost fact. 
A vapid and soulless naturalism will be all that is left, 
and we shall keep the gospel only as a something in di- 
vine figure and form, on which to play our natural sen- 


132 RELIGIOUS NATURE, 


timents. In this view it is that I propose the distine. 
tion stated, between having a religious nature, and be- 
ing in a religious life. That we may unfold and verify 
this distinction, consider,— 

1. What it is, accurately understood, to have a relig- 
ious nature. 

It is neither more nor less than to be a man, a being 
made for God and religion ; so far, and in such sense, 
a religious being. It implies, in other words, that we 
are so made as to want God, just as a child’s nature 
wants a mother and a father. It does not follow, that 
the child ever knew, or, practically speaking, ever had 
either one or the other. And yet the want is none the 
less real on that account; for when it feels itself an or- 
phan, out on the broad world alone, it only sighs the 
more bitterly, it may be, for the solitary lot it is in : and, 
when it notes the tender love and faithful sympathy in 
which other children are sheltered in their homes, how 
sadly does it grieve and weep many times for that un- 
known, unremembered parentage it can never look to 
or behold! So it is with our religiousnature. Itmay 
not consciously pine after God, as an orphan for his 
lost parents; and yet God is the necessary complement 
of all its feelings, hopes, satisfactions, and endeavors. 
Without God, all it is becomes abortion. It wants 
God as its completest, almost only want; feeling in- 
stinctively after him even in its voluntary neglect of 
him, and consciously or unconsciously, willingly or un- 
willingly, longing and hungering for the bread of his 
fatherly relationship. And it hungers none the less 


ee 


AND RELIGIOUS CHARACTER. 133 


truly that it stays aloof from him, refuses to seek him 
in prayer, tries to forget him and be hidden from him, 
or even fights against all terms of duty towards him; 
even as the starving madman is none the less hungry, 
or fevered by hunger, that he refuses to eat. 

Now this natural something in the soul, which 
makes God its principal and first want, includes very 
nearly its natural everything. It has not a faculty 
that is not somehow related to God. It feels the 
beauty of God, even his moral beauty. All its bosom- 
sentiments would play around him, and bask in his 
goodness. Considering who God is, it has the feeling 
of admiration towards him, rising sometimes even up 
to the pitch of sublimity. God’s creating strength 
and all-dominating sovereignty in good, are just that 
in the soul, without which he would not be sufficiently 
great. His omnipresence, thought of, it may be, with 
dread, is yet thought of also as the needed qualification 
of a complete world-care and government. Reason gets 
at.no limit of rest and satisfaction till it culminates in 
God. The imagination flies through solitary worlds 
of vacancy and cold, till it feels the brightness of 
God’s light on its wings, and meets him shining every- 
where. Even fear wants to come and hide in his 
bosom ; and guilt, withering under his frown, would 
only frown upon him if he were not exactly just, or 
less just than he is. 
| There isa kind of incipient feeling after the state of 
piety thus, in what we call the religious nature. It 
has great sentiments swelling in its depths, honors 

12 


134 RELIGIOUS NATURE, 


waiting there for truth, glad emotions waiting tc 
spring up and meet the face of God’s beauty, aspira- 
tions climbing after his recognition, dependencies of 
feeling running out their tendrils to lay hold of him ix 
trust. 

Nor let any one imagine that these things are at all 
the less true, under the perverse and perverting effects 
of human depravity. Human nature as created is up- 
right, as born or propagated, a corrupted and damaged 
nature. But however corrupted and damaged, how- 
ever fallen, it has the original divine impress on it, 
everywhere discernible. It has the same feelings, sen- 
timents, powers of thought and affection, the same 
longings and aspirations, only choked in their volume, 
and crazed by the stormy battle of internal discord and 
passion in which they have their element. The most 
sad fact—fact and also evidence—of human depravity 
is, that the religious nature stands a temple still for 
God, only scarred and blackened by the brimstone fires 
of evil; more majestic possibly as a ruin, than it would 
be if it did not prove its grandeur by the desolations 
it withstands. 

Denying therefore, as we must, that human nature 
is less really religious because it is depraved, or dam- 
aged by sin,—as on mere physiological principles it 
must be—denying also that it is made incapable of ap- 
proving or admiring God, or being drawn by his beau- 
ty, it is not to be denied that there are times or moods, 
when it will even be exasperated by his very perfec. 
tions; that is, when it is tormented by its own guilti 


AND RELIGIOUS CHARACTER. 135 


ness, and resolved on courses of life which God is 
known, with all his might of sovereignty, to oppose. 
At such times, there will flame up a horrible fire of 
malignity ; and the better he is, the more dislike of him 
will be felt. But these are only moods. The same 
persons, in a different mood, when they are not think- 
ing of themselves, and not pressed by the sense of con- 
flict with him, will think of him admiringly, and al- 
most lovingly; as it were, feel after him, to know him 
more perfectly. The religious nature in them is more 
constant than their moods of perversity, and is reaching 
after God in a certain way of natural desire all the 
while. Holding fast now these conceptions of the re- 
ligious nature, let us pass on,— 

2. To inquire what it is to be in the practically relig- 
ious life; or, what is the same, to be in religious char- 
acter. There is nothing practical in having a merely 
religious nature. A very bad man has it as truly as a 
good: the most confirmed atheist has it. Mere natu- 
ral desire, want, sentiment God-ward, do not make a 
religious character. They are even compatible and 
consistent often with a character most profoundly irre- 
ligious. What does it signify that the nature is feel- 
ing after God, when the life is utterly against him? If 
a man has a natural sense of honor, does it make him 
an honorable man, when he betrays every trust and vi- 
olates every bond of friendship? If a man has a fine 
natural sensibility to truth, does it make him a true 
man, when he is a sophist or a liar in all the practice 
of his life? Where there is naturally a fine sense of 


136 RELIGIOUS NATURE, 


moral beauty, and a capacity to draw the picture of 
it even with admirable justice and artistic skill, does it 
make the man a morally beautiful character, when his 
life, as will not seldom happen, is a life in utter disor- 
der and deformity? Even a thief may have a good 
sentiment of justice, and be only the more consciously 
guilty because of it. There may even be a wondrously 
tender sensibility in the heart of a robber or assassin ; 
such, that in his family, or among his clan, he will be 
abundant in the most gentle and kindest offices. And 
in just the same way a man may have the finest feel- 
ing of natural reverence to God, the highest senti- 
ments of admiration for God’s character, the grandest 
rational convictions of his value to the world, as its 
moral Governor and providential Keeper, and yet not 
have so much as a trace of genuine piety in the life. 
He may even go sofar as to enjoy the greatness and 
beauty of God, and have the finest things to say of 
him, and have no trace of a genuinely religious charac- 
ter, any more than if he were enjoying or praising a 
landscape. He will do the two things, in fact, in ex- 
actly the same manner; and one will have just as 
much to do for his piety as the other. 

What, then, is it to be a practically religious man ? 
When is it and how, that a man begins to be religious 
in the sense of religious character? To conceive this 
matter distinctly, two things need to be understood be- 
forehand. First, that religious character is more than 
mere natural character, and different from it, as what 
we are by constitution is different from what we do, 


AND RELIGIOUS CHARACTER. 137 


and practically seek, and freely become. It is that 
which lies in choice, and for which we are thus re- 
sponsible. It is made by what the soul’s liberty goes 
after, with a reigning devotion,—what it chooses and 


lives for as its end. If the man, therefore, lives for 


himself, or for the world, as all men do in the way of 
sin, he is without God, without religious character, 
and is all the more guilty in it, that his nature is feel- 
ing after God in throes of disappointed longing. Then 
again, secondly, it must be understood that souls are 
made for God, to have him always present in them, 
and working in their liberty itself, even as gravity is 
in matter, impelling its motions. They are to know 
God and be conscious of him, even as they know and 
are conscious of themselves. They are to live and move 
and have their being in him,—not as omnipresence 
only, but as inward revelation. Inspiration is to be 
their life, and their freedom is to be complete in the 
freedom and sovereignty of God. As they are God’s 
offspring, they are to live in his Fatherhood, and have 
their finite being complemented in the sense of his in- 
finite greatness and perfection inwardly discovered. 
Assuming these two points, it follows that a man is 
never in religious character till he has found God ; and 
that he will never find him, till his whole voluntary na- 
ture goes after him, and chimes with him in his princi- 
ples andends. Whatever ends he has had of his own 
must be given up, as being his own, and God’s must be 
enthroned in him by a supreme devotion. “ Ye shall 
seek for me and find me, if ye search for me with all 
id 


138 RELIGIOUS NATURE, 


your heart.” God can not have room to spread him. , 
self in the soul, and fill it with his inspirations, when it — 
is hugging itself, and is habitually set on having its 
own ways. A great revolution is so far needed, there- 
fore, if it is to find God; for God can not be revealed 
in it, or born into it, save when it comes away from all 
its lower ends to be in God’s. No movings of mere 
natural sentiment reach this point. Nothing but a 
voluntary surrender of the whole life to his will pre- 
pares it to be set in this open relation to God. And 
just here it is, accordingly, that religious character be- 
gins. The soul, as a nature, feeling instinctively after 
him, bafiled still and kept back by self-devotion, has 
in fact no trace of piety. It is only when God is moy- 
ing into it, and living in it, that the true piety begins: 
this is the root and life of the religious character. 
Now it communes knowingly with God, receives of 
God, walks with God, and lives by a hidden life from 
him. Now, for the first time, the religious nature is 
fulfilled, and all its longings rest in the divine fullness. 
It has found God. Observe now,— 

3. How easily, and in how many ways, the workings 
of the mere religious nature may be confounded with 
the workings of religious character, and, as successful 
counterfeits, take their place. The admiration of 
God’s beauty—what is it, some will say, but love? Do 
we not, then, all of us, love God? The sentimental 
pleasure felt in God’s qualities,—what is it but the real 
joy of religion? and how satisfactory it is to think so! 
Even the soul’s deep throbs of want,—what are they 


AND RELIGIOUS CHARACTER. 1389 


_ but its hungerings after righteousness? and that void of 
hunger must be filled, even though it refuses to be. Sa 
they think. In short, there is a vast religious poetry 
in the soul’s nature ; and what is it all but a religious 
character begun? Is any thing more certain, as we 
look on man, than that he is a religious being; and 
what is this, by a straight inference, but to say that he 
has a naturally religious character? And so it comes 
to pass, that religion is the same thing as mere natural 
sentiment; and the feeling after God—poor, flashy 
delusion !—substitutes the finding God altogether. 
And this it is thought, by alas how many, is the 
more intelligent kind of religion! They love to hear 
of it, because it plays on their natural sentiment so 
finely. Itis almost a modern discovery, and they love 
to be religious in this way. It will not organize a 
church, or raise a mission, or instigate a prayer, or help 
any one to bear an enemy, and even quite dispenses 
with finding God; the Spirit of God bearing witness 
with our spirit is not init; but, for all this, it seems to 
be a more superlative kind of religion ! 

We can hardly think it possible that a feeble impos- 
ture like this should beguile the most common under- 
standing ; and yet we have had a most eloquent teacher 
of this religion vaunting himself in it, here in our New 
England, as if it were the true Christianity! He finds 
a natural reverence for God in souls, sentiments of 
adoration towards him, longings that feel after him; 
and that he calls religion. All men have it; no man, 
even the worst, wants it. And the true doctrine is, 


140 RELIGIOUS NATURE, 


that, living in the plane of nature, we are to cultivate 
ourselves in it, and grow better always—certain always 
of being religious because of it. And this kind of 
mock gospel is infusing itself, by a subtle contagion, 
into the general mind of our times; appearing and re 
appearing in our literature, sometimes in our sermons, 
and turning our youth quite away from every thing 
most vital and solid in the supernatural, soul-renewing 
doctrine of Christ. 

It is exactly the religion of Herod, who did many 
things under John’s preaching, and heard him gladly, 
and then took off his head to please a dancing woman. 
He had all the sentiments of religion, and loved to 
have them brought into play; but the graceful trip of 
dancing feet pleased him a great deal more! Pilate, 
the Roman, had the same religious nature, felt the 
greatness, quivered in sublimest awe of Jesus, and de- 
voutly washed his hands to be clear of the blood, and 
ended by giving up the glorious and majestic victim to 
his murderers. Felix had the same religion ; so had 
‘Agrippa; so had Balaam; and the world is full of it, 
—sensibility to God, truth, right, coupled with a prac- 
tical non-reception of all. 

It results, accordingly, just as we should expect, that 
there are always two kinds or classes of religion in the 
world ; those which are the product of a religious sen- 
timent more or less blind, and those which look to the 
regeneration of character; religions that are feeling 
after God, and a true religion that finds him, and dis. 
covers him inwardly tothe soul. The religion of the 


AND RELIGIOUS CHARACTER. 141 


Athenians was of the former class, and all the idola- 
trous religions of the world are of the same kind. 
What a sublime and almost appalling proof of the re 
ligious nature of man, feeling dimly, groping blindly 
after God, imagining that he is somewhere and every- 
where; in the sun, in the moon, in the snakes of the 
ground, the beetles of the air, the poor tame vegeta- 
bles of the garden, the many-headed monsters carved 
in wood or stone, that never were any where but in the 
crazy fancy of superstition! Look on these, and see 
how man feels after God: does he therefore find him ? 
And if we speak of character, truth, love, mercy, pu- 
rity, in what do those blind struggles of our almost di- 
vine nature issue, but in a defect of every thing heav- 
enly, and even comely? What but hells of character 
are these idolatrous religions ? 

Under the guise of Christianity, too, we may distin- 
guish at least two kinds of religion, that are corrupted 
-in a greater or less degree by infusions of the same 
error. One is the religion of forms, where the soul is 
taken by them as a matter of taste; loves to play rev- 
erence under them ; has a great delight in their bean- 
ty, antiquity, order; and takes the mere sentimental 
pleasure it has in them, and the hope of being buried 
in them, for the certain reality of religious character. 
The other is a religion of sentiment throughout, and 
fed by reason; feeling after God in the beautiful and 
grand objects of nature; pleased to have such high 
sentiments towards him; taking hold of these senti- 
ments to cultivate them more and more; delighted 


142 RELIGIOUS NATURE, 


with Christ’s beautiful lessons of natural virtue ; and 
praising him even as the finest of all the great men of 
the world! It is not intended, under either of these 
mistaken forms of worship, to renounce Christianity ; 
and the mischiefs they propagate in their adherents are 
in all degrees. Sometimes the infusion of sentiment- 
ality is slight, sometimes it quite takes the place of pi- 
ety, and there is no room left for so much as a vestige 
to grow. Now, the true gospel is that which brings a 
regenerative power, and creates the soul anew in God’s 
image. _Any religion that has not this is so far a mock 
religion. The true test question, therefore, by which 
every man is to try his religion is this,—have I found 
God in it? Has it more than pleased me? has it 
pierced me, brought me to the light, given me to know 
God? If it has not done this for you, too little can 
not be made of it. And the sooner it is cast behind 
you, with all its fine sentiments, in a total turning of 
your heart to God himself, the better. The life of God 
tn the soul of man,—that is religious character, and be- 
side that there is none. And that is salvation, with- 
out which there is no salvation. For this it is that 
makes salvation ; that the soul, before without God 
alienated from the life of God, is won back to a real 
God-welcome, and has him revealed inwardly in holy 
Fatherhood, as the life of its life. Hungry as the prod- 
igal, it has come back from its wanderings in shameful 
penitence, to be greeted with a kiss, and clothed again, 
and feasted, and hear its Father say, “O dead, thou — 
art alive again !” 


AND RELIGIOUS CHARACTER. 143 


Having endeavored, in this manner, to impress the 
wide distinction between a religious nature anda relig- 
ious character, between feeling after God and finding 
him, I must bring my illustrations to a close. 

The sum of the whole matter is this,—understand, 
have it never to be disguised from you, that your sal- 
vation lies in finding God, and that you may know 
your salvation only as you know that you have found 
him,—know that you have found him as the graciously 
felt preserver, the conductor, guide, peace, joy of your 
heart. You will not know him outwardly, but with- 
in by the secret flood of his movement in your life. 
You will be consciously configured to his character as 
once you were not ; raised, exalted, married to his ends, 
one with him. Count yourself no Christian, because 
you like thoughts and discourses about God. Be 
jealous of any gospel that merely pleases you, and 
puts your natural sentiments aglow. See God in the 
flowers, if you will; but ask no gospel made up of 
flowers. Look after a sinner’s gospel, one that brings 
you God himself. Doubtless you are hungry; there- 
fore you want bread, and not any mere feeling after 
it. Understand the tragic perils of your sin, and 
think nothing strong enough for you but a tragic sal- 
vation. Require a transforming religion, not a pleas- 
ing. Be enticed by no flattering sentimentalities, 
which the children of nature are everywhere taking 
for a religion. Refuse to sail in the shallows of the 
sea; strike out into the deep waters where the surges 
roll heavily, as in God’s majesty, and the gales of the 


144 RELIGIOUS NATURE, 


Spirit blow. Man your piety as a great expedition : 
against God’s enemies and yours, and hope for no deli- — 
cate salvation, not to be won by great sacrifices and 
perils. 

Let me add in this connection, also, a word of ne- 
cessary caution respecting a particular form of unbe- 
lief that is now common. How many are beginning 
to say, and have it for a fine discovery, that there is 
no such thing as a distinction of kind among men; 
nothing to hang a distinction of worlds upon ; noth- 
ing to make that distinction better than a superstitious 
moonshine of the past ages! Saints, and not saints; 
born of God, and not born; sons of God, and aliens, 
—these are all a kind of fiction that has come to an 
end. Are we not all religious, all good?’—some a 
little, some more, and some very good? Even where 
there is no pretense of piety, where there is great 
wrong, corruption, brutality of life, is there not still a 
little sense of God that only wants to be increased ; 
some tender yearnings after God, however suppressed ? 
What have we, then, but distinctions of degrees, and 
no distinction of kind? Where, then, is the footing 
for heaven and hell? Let this fiction go: it is time 
now to be clear of it. I have shown you here, I think, 
where the true distinction lies, and the profound reality 
of it. No great gulf fixed was ever thought of that is 
wider or deeper, or more absolute. It is the distinction 
between a religious nature and a religious character. 
We all have such a nature, feeling after God; but we 
have not all found him. We all have religious senti- 


AND RELIGIOUS CHARACTER. 145 


ments, desires, yearnings ; but how many never choose 
a religious end! how many, in fact, never did any 
thing in the practical life, but trample the sentiments, 
desires, yearnings of their nature, in lives of disobedi. 
ence, and a fight of rejection against God and every 
holy thing! No, my friends, the gospel distinctions 
are not gone by; the heaven and hell of the Scripture 
are not yet antiquated. Here they stand, based in the 
everlasting distinction of kind: darkness and light, 
chaos and order, falsehood and truth, are not more op- 
posite, more impossible to be reconciled. A religious 
nature signifies nothing where there is no religious 
character; nothing, I mean, but the greater wrong, 
and wrath the more deserved. 

Once more, it must strike you all alike, the most un- 
religious as truly as the others, that it is a very great 
thing, in such a view as that now presented, to have a 
religious nature. Oh, if you had any true sense of it, 
you would even begin to tremble at the thought of 
yourselves! See, the whole world over, in all ages 
and times, men shaping their strange religions: they 
are groping all and feeling after God, to them the un- 
known God. And you, it may be, are doing the same. 
Your great nature, made in his image, answers to him, 
reaches after him in suppressed longings. A sublime 
uneasiness keeps you astir, and you know not what it 
means. You think of it often, perhaps, or even speak 
of it complainingly, that God has made your life so 
strangely barren. The secret of it is, that you are 
empty, hungry, shivering in the cold, for want of God; 

13 


146 RELIGIOUS NATURE, 


and that because you seek him not. Always feeling 
after what you always have not, and eyen refuse to 
have: how can it be otherwise? And what is to be- 
come of this great, almost divine nature, that is heaving 
thus in your bosom? This will become of it, and noth- 
ing else. It will grope and.writhe and sigh, only tast- 
ing now and then little admirations of God, till finally 
its lofty affinities will all go outand die. All faculties 
that can not have their use grow stunted and thin and 
withered, as inevitably even as an arm or a leg. 
How much more the godlike powers and affinities of 
the religious nature, when for years and years they 
can not have their God,—receptivities all, yet never al- 
lowed to receive. 

So God understands, himself; and therefore keeps 
himself near, wanting to be found. Even as the apos- 
tle told those groping, blind men of Athens, “Though 
he be not far from any one of us.” They were all 
feeling after him instinctively, even in their vices and 
grim idolatries ; and still he was nigh, ready, behind 
their thinnest veils of thought, to break through into 
the discovery of their heart. God was pronounced, in 
fact, upon their whole nature, in every faculty and 
fibre. And yet they could not find him. Therefore, 
also, he became at last incarnate in his Son, and put 
himself before their senses, and took society with them, 
and showed them what they might have thought im- 
possible, that the unseen, infinite Being has a suffering 
concern for just those hungry natures that in sin are 
groping after him. And this Christ is for us all,— 


AND RELIGIOUS CHARACTER. 147 


“the light of the knowledge of the glory of God.” 
The veil is taken away. To come unto Jesus now, 
and believe in him as one come out from God is really 
to find him. No one can earnestly seek him now, and 
miss of him. Mere feeling after him by dim instinct 
will not find him, but earnest, honest, prayerful seek- 
ing will. And therefore he declared himself, in his 
first sermon, when he took up his ministry,—would 
that all ye hungering and groping souls could hear 
the promise !—‘ Ask, and ye shall receive; seek and 
ye shall find ; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. 
For every one that asketh receiveth, and he that seek- 
eth findeth, and to him that knocketh it shall be 
opened.” What an opening is that which opens the 
discovery of God! and what a finding is that which 
finds him ! 


VIII. 


THE PROPERTY RIGHT WE ARE 10 GETIN 
SOULS. 


“For I seek not yours, but you.,—2 Cor. 12: 14. 


It is our common way as well as delusion, to be de- 
siring what men have, and not the men themselves; to 
get a property if possible out of their property, and 
not to create the same by our own industry. The 
manner of our great Apostle is exactly contrary. He 
has sought these wayward Corinthians in two voyages 
and two campaigns of gospel service, and is writing 
now his second long epistle to them, promising to 
come a third time and restore them, if possible, from 
their aberrations and scandals. They have heretofore 
not even borne his expenses, it would seem, or so 
much as taken him to their hospitality, and now they 
are most ungratefully decrying and depreciating his 
ministry. But he can not let them go, though the 
more abundantly he loves them the less he be loved. 
Is he not their father? and it is not the common way, 
he reminds them, for children to lay up for the pa- 
rents, but the parents for the children. Uninvited, 
therefore, expecting neither welcome nor reward, he 
says he will come to them again for their sakes only— 


“for I seek not yours but you.” He had come into his 
(148) 


THE PROPERTY RIGHT, ETC. 149 


master’s way so perfectly, in short, that other men, or 
souls, were valuable to him, even as children to par- 
ents—the best, the only substance that he cared to 
seek. Here, then, is the subject I propose for your 
consideration, viz : 


The value one man has to another ; or, what is the same, 
the real interest of property which a true desciple has, or 
may have, in the souls of other men. 

It is common to speak of the immense value of the 
soul, that is, the value it has to itself; it is common to 
speak of the love which one soul ought to have to 
other souls; neither of these is the subject I propose ; 
but it is to show the real value of one soul, or man to 
another, as being in some very true sense a possessory 
value. 

I suppose there may be some who had never such a 
thought occur to them in their lives. And the rea- 
son, if we care to understand it, is that in the great 
life-struggle we maintain with each other, under the 
dominion of selfishness, we take up the impression 
that we all stand in the way of each other, and are 
really nothing but a hindrance to the comfort and hap- 
piness one of another. We have so many public wars 
and private quarrels, so many rivalries, the problem 
of obtaining wealth is so often nothing but a finding 
how to get what belongs to others; we have so many 
frauds, hatreds, oppressions, envies, jealousies, and are 
brewing so constantly in these selfish turbulences, that 
it becomes a great part of our life to keep off, or if 

13* , 


150 THE PROPERTY RIGHT 


possible to keep under, one another. Hence it can 
not even occur to many, as their grandest right and 
privilege, to get a property in one another, and have 
it for a permanent and dear possession. 

Furthermore, we get accustomed to the idea that 
there is no property but legal property; no property 
right, therefore, in a man to be thought of, save the 
ownership that makes him a slave. Whereas the 
dearest, broadest properties we have are not legal. 
The wife does not legally own her husband, though 
she says, with how much meaning, “he is mine.” 
No man legally owns his friend. So, also, we all have 
a most real, but not legal, property in all beautiful 
landscapes, in the air and the light, in the stars and 
the ranges of the sea. In a still different view, what- 
ever and whomsoever we love, in the sense of religion, 
becomes a positive value to us, though it be no legal 
value; for it is the nature of this love that it gets a 
property in its objects; so that if we love a man’s suc- 
cesses, or his grounds, or his gains, we possess the 
usufruct, in a more complete enjoyment, possibly, 
than he does himself. Putting aside then all such in- 
sufficient or false impressions, I now undertake to 
show that one man has to another a value more real 
than gold, or lands, or any legal property of the world 
can have. 


And I open the argument here by calling your at- 
tention to the fact that God so evidently means to 
make every community valuable to every other, and 


WE ARE TO GET IN SOULS. 151 


so far, at least, every man to every other. We see 
this on a magnificent scale in the article of com- 
merce. Here we find the nations all at work for each 
other, in so many different climes and localities, pre- 
paring one for another articles of comfort, sustenance, 
and ornament; and then commerce intervening, 
makes the exchanges; so that every people is receiv- 
ing back to itself supplies that the whole human race, 
we may almost say, have been at work as producers 
to contribute. Even if they owned the industry one 
of another, they could not turn it to better account. 
. Thus if you raise the question at your breakfast-table, 
on almost any morning of the year, whence come 
these simple comforts of food, and condiment, and 
furniture, you will find that almost every people and 
clime under heaven is represented as a contribu- 
tor—the coffee is from one, the tea from another, the 
urns, and cups, and plates, and spoons, it may be, 
from as many others; and so on down to the sugar, 
and salt, and pepper, and all the outfit of the table, 
Your breakfast is gotten up for you, as it were, by the 
whole world; and so far you possess the world. 

The same, again, is true of all the arts, professions, 
trades and grades of employment, in a given com- 
munity. They are at work for each other in ways of 
concurrent service. All injustice, wrong, and fraud 
excluded, iiey so far own each other. Their indus- 
tries and gifts are all so many complementary contri- 
butions. The capital, the science, the contriving 
heads, the operative hands, the powers of every sort, 


152 THE PROPERTY RIGHT 


are mutually concurrent, mutually own each other, 
and taken together, constitute a complete whole of 
endowment—called a community because the unity is 
for all, and a commonwealth because the weal or 
wealth is common to all. 

And again, what we discover in these mere econ 
omic relations is the type of a mutual interest and 
ownership, in qualities that are personal. The very 
idea of society and the social nature is that we shall 
be a want, and a gift of enjoyment, one to another ; 
necessary in such a sense to each other, that existence 
itself can be only worthless, save as we lay hold of 
each other in some fellow-feeling, and fulfill answering 
conditions of social benefit. We possess, in short, so- 
ciety, and society is universal ownership. 

To see what reality there is in this, you have only 
to imagine how desolate, and how truly insupportable, 
your life would be in a state of complete solitude, or 
absolutely sole existence. Not that you want merely 
to receive outward conveniences, such as no one per- 
son can produce, or prepare for himself—the privation 
is not a merely economic privation—you want society 
of soul, though by the supposition you have never 
known what it is; to speak and be spoken to, to 
play out feeling and have it played back by some an- 
swering nature ; to see, in the faces of men like your- 
self, the beaming intelligence of kindred beings, who 
are struggling with the same thoughts, and suffering 
the same dread mystery of experience with yourself. 
For this hitherto unknown something you ache, 


WE ARE TO GET IN SOULS. 153 


though you can not imagine where it is, or whence it 
may come. So pressing is this want, that even life 
itself becomes a silent agony. You wade the rivers, 
and creep through the forests, and climb the hills, 
looking for you know not what, resting nowhere, sigh- 
ing and groaning everywhere. You gaze into the sky 
and try to get a look of recognition from the stars; 
you listen to the wind as if it were trying to vent 
itself in sighs like your own; you peer into the faces 
of the animals and, though they are faces plainly 
enough, the fellow-something is not there. The 
world, in short, even up to the sun and the stars, is 
nothing but a prison about you of absolute solitary 
confinement ; a vast grand prison, indeed, but yet a 
prison ; nay, a horrible dungeon, dark at noonday to 
your heart; and it will not be strange if, for the sim- 
ple want of society, you crumble down at last into 
idiocy, as malefactors are so often known to do, 
under the heavy years of unnatural torture to which 
they are subjected, in what is called their discipline 
of solitary confinement. 

What we call society, in this manner, is the usu- 
fruct we have of each other, and has a property value 
as truly as the food that supplies our bodies. We 
may not commonly think of it in this way, and yet 
we are making constant experiment of the fact, even 
when we do not. Almost every full-aged man, for 
example, has, at some time, been a weary traveler, 
picking his way through some wide forest, or roaming 
across some solitary prairie. From early morn till 


154 THE PROPERTY RIGHT 

noon, and toward evening, he has seen no human 
being, heard no voice. Consciously his tone of feel- 
ing has been sinking, and a kind of oppression has 
been coming upon him. The long solitude of so 
many hours has damped his spirits, and he begins to 
imagine how good it would be to meet and speak to 
some person. At last he sees a man approaching in 
the distance. They stop, of course—the two stran- 
gers 


and change salutations, multiplying inquiries 
that have no object but simply to protract the inter- 
change or feeding time of their social nature; talking 
about the weather, and the way, which both of them 
knew well enough before; giving volunteer suggestions 
about the place whence they are from, and the object, 
very likely, of their journey; till finally, when they 
start again, which they will do with a lighter heart 
and a freer motion, the humanity they have given out, 
and the humanity they have taken in, will be a bath 
of refreshment to them for whole hours after. The 
same thing may be seen, under another form, in the 
case of those monks and eremites, who, like St. An- 
thony, withdrew voluntarily from the society of man, 
to live in deserts and solitary places alone; violating, 
in the name of religion, all God’s appointments for 
their life. The remarkable thing is that, in so many 
cases, they began to be assaulted—as they thought, and 
even seemed with their eyes to see—by many and 
fierce devils of temptation. It was only the necessary 
wail of their own disordered, fevered soul, shaping 
into visible demons the crazy woes of its inward life, 


: | 


WE ARE TO GET IN SOULS. 155 


exasperated and frenzied by the unnatural torment 
of their solitude. What should they see but devils, 
when they refuse to see their fellow-men for whom 
Christ died? 

Again, what interest every soul may have, or what 
property get, in other souls, will be seen still more af- 
fectingly, in the fact that, bittered as we are by self- 
ishness, almost every thing we do looks, in some way, 
to the approbation, or favoring opinion, or inspiration 
of others. We dress, we build, we cultivate our be- 
stowments generally, with a view to the impressions 
or opinions of others. See, for example, how the 
great soul of a Newton bows itself to study for years 
and years, in the intensest self-application, that he 
may discover and give to the world’s mind his grand 
expositions of light, and of the laws of the astronomic 
worlds. He values that mind, and even lives for what 
he may put in it, or dispense to it, or be in its 
thought. So of the great poets, painters, sculptors, 
antiquarians, writers of history, travelers, magistrates, 
heroes—no matter how selfish they may be, they are 
looking still to other souls, or minds, and resting 
their great expectations there. 

Ihave lingered thus in the domain of the natural 
life, because the illustrations here furnished are so im- 
pressive. Let us enter now the field of Christian love 
and duty, and carry our argument up into the higher 
relations here existing. If selfishness even finds so 
great value in the sentiments, opinions, homages of 
other men, how shall it be with goodness and benefac 


156 THE PROPERTY RIGHT 


tion? Here it is that we come out into the great 
Apostle’s field where he says—“not yours but you.” 
“Tt is not,” he would say, ‘‘ what you can give me, or 
withhold from me, but it is what I can do to you, and 
be in you, and make you to be—to raise you up out 
of sin into purity and liberty and truth, to fill you 
with the light of God and his peace, to make you like 
God, and transform your disordered nature so that 
your inmost currents of thought, and feeling, and life 
shall be changed by me forever—this is my reward, 
which, if I may get, I want no other. For this I 
journey, and preach, and write, and pray, and will do 
so, till I have made you my joy and crown of re- 
joicing.” He does not conceive that he is saving 
souls simply as being valuable to themselves, but as 
being valuable also to him, just according to the bene- 
fits he enters into them. He makes them in this man- 
ner a property to himself. 

Let us look a little into this matter of property. 
How does it come? How does a man, for example, 
come to be acknowledged as the owner of a piece of 
land and to say to himself, “it is mine?” The gen- 
eral answer given to this question, for I can not stay 
to settle it by discussion, is that we get a property in 
things, by putting our industry into them, in ways of 
use, culture and improvement. This makes our title, 
and then the ownership is bought or sold as by title. 
Just so when a Christian benefactor enters good inte 
a soul; when he takes it away from the wildness and 
disorder of nature, by the prayers and faithful labors 


Lame 


WE ARE TO GET IN SOULS. 157 


he expends upon it, the necessary result is that he gets 
a property in it, feels it to be his, values it as being 
his. Neither is it any thing to say that he gets, in 
this manner, no exclusive title to it, therefore no prop- 
erty at all. No kind of property is exclusive. God 
is still concurrent owner of all the lands we hold in 
fee. The State is so far owner, also, that we hold 
them as of the State, and so far subject to State 
ownership or eminent domain, that they may be 
rightfully taken for public uses, when it is necessary. 
So a man may get ownership in his neighbor, and his 
poor brother, and the State may have ownership in 
both, and God a higher ownership in all. And the 
ownership in all such cases is only the more real be- 
cause it is not exclusive. So then, it comes to pass 
that improvement in a soul gets ownership in it, even 
as it does in land; and the Christian disciple makes 
any soul that he saves valuable to himself and a prop- 
erty, just according to what it is made to be to itself, 
by the good he has entered into it. And how great 
and blessed a property it is to him, we can only see 
by a careful computation of the values by which he 
measures it. 

First, as he has come to look himself on the eternal 
in every thing, he has a clear perception of souls as 
being the most real of all existences—more real than 
lands and gold, and a vastly higher property—be- 
cause they are eternal, and the title once gained is 
only consummated by death, not taken away. 

Next, finding this or that human spirit or soul, in a 

14 


158 THE PROPERTY RIGHT 


condition of darkness and disease and fatal damage, 
he begins forthwith to find an object in it, and an in- 
spiring hope to be realized in its necessity. He takes 
it thus upon himself, draws near to it, hovers round it 
in love, and prayer, and gracious words, and more 
gracious example, to regain it to truth and to God. 
For if it be a matter so inspiring to a Newton that he 
may put into other minds the right scientific concep- 
tion of light, or of the stars, how much greater and 
higher the interest a good soul has in imparting to 
another goodness; the element of its own divine 
peace and well-being. 

Then, again, as we get a property in other men by 
the power we exert in them, how much greater the 
property obtained by that kind of power which is 
supernaturally, transformingly beneficent ; that which 
subdues enmity, illuminates darkness, fructifies ster- 
ility, changes discord to harmony, war to peace, and 
raises a spirit in ruin up to be a temple of God’s in- 
dwelling life. If it be something great to make our- 
selves felt, acknowledged, respected,in a diseased soul, 
how much more to change that disease itself into 
health; if it be something to fill a place in bad souls, 
how much more to make them beautiful in truth and 
love and purity. What a thought, indeed, is this for 
a Christian disciple to entertain, that he may exalt the 
consciousness of a human soul, or spirit, forever, and 
live in it forever as a causality of joy and beauty. 
And this it was that so fervently kindled the disin- 


WE ARE TO GET IN SOULS. 159 


terested zeal of our Apostle—“ For ye are our glory 
and joy.” ; 

Furthermore, when one has gained another to God 
and a holy life, there is a most dear, everlasting rela- 
tionship established between them—one leading, so to 
speak, the other’s good eternity, and the other behold- 
ing in him the benefactor by whose work and example 
he is consciously exalted forever—and this gracious 
relationship will give them an eternally mutual prop- 
erty in each other. And so all Christian friends will 
have gotten a property in each other, as they have 
done each other good, being entered thus into one 
another, and so into the sense of relationships an- 
swering to their mutual benefactions and the good 
offices by which they have bought an everlasting inte- 
rest in the feeling, history, personal well-being and 
inmost life, one of another. In this manner it is 
given us for our beautiful divine privilege to have a 
property in every one we meet, if only we can find 
how to bless him. Owning society, we have a field 
where mines richer than those of gold are open to us 
on every side. Going after what men have, we get 
nothing; after men themselves, a property that is 
everlasting. 

Hence, also, it is, that the Scriptures of God’s truth 
are so much in the commendation of this heavenly 
property. If we go after fame, they tell us that the 
name of the wicked shall rot. If we go after riches 
and cover ourselves with the outward splendors of 
fortune, they tell us that we must go out of life as 


160 THE PROPERTY RIGHT 


poor as any; for, that having brought nothing mate- 
rial into the world, we can carry nothing material out. 
And then they add, do the works of love and truth, 
and these shall go with you. He that winneth souls 
is wise. They that turn many to righteousness shall 
shine as the stars forever and ever. Be fishers of 
men. Watch for souls. If thy brother sin against 
thee, gain, if possible, thy brother. Be all things to 
all men, if by any means you may gain some. And 
then, when you have worn out all your powers in 
benefactions put upon souls, and believe that you have 
many who will be your crown of rejoicing in the day 
of the Lord Jesus—then, I say, when the last hour is 
come, and the scenes of your mortal labor are retiring 
from your sight, have it for your song of triumph, and 
leave it to be chanted over your rest— Blessed are 
the dead that die in the Lord; for they rest from their 
labors, and their works do follow them.” All mate- 
rial properties are left behind; these can not follow: 
but all the properties of duty and love must follow, 
and be gathered in after you to bless your fidelity, and 
crown your peace, and be your sacred wealth forever. 
Then it shall be seen what is meant by the value of 
one soul to another. 

Just here, in fact, will be opened to your now puri- 
fied love the discovery of this great truth; viz., that 
there is indeed no real property at all but spirit-prop- 
erty, or property in spirit; a possession, that is, by 
each soul of what he has added to the moral universe 
of the good. All values here become social, values of 


* 
WE ARE TO GET IN SOULS. 161 


truth, and feeling, and worship, and conscious affinity 
with God. And this is heaven; the state of mutual 
ownership and everlasting usufruct, prepared in all 
God’s righteous populations, by what they have right- 
eously done. 

Accepting now the solid and sublimely practical 
truth thus carefully expounded, the salvation of men 
is seen to be a work that ought to engage every Chris- 
tian, and a work that to be fitly done, must be heart- 
ily and energetically done. If we talk of it simply 
as a duty, and push ourselves into it by that kind of 
compulsion, we shall do nothing but simply to make a 
feint of it. We may tell how great value the souls 
we are after have to themselves ; but, if they have no 
value to us, they might as well have none at all. It 
is unfortunate, in this matter, that we speak of souls 
and not of men; for soul is a ghostly word, and we 
are doubting, half the time, whether a creature so far 
out of body is any thing. If we speak of souls, let 
them be men, everlasting men, whom we everlastingly 
want, and have it for our privilege to gain, our right 
to enjoy; and then what practical energy and holy 
stress will there be in our endeavor. Our difficulty, 
in this matter, is that we are too delicate, too tenderly 
conventional, too mindful of the respectabilities. We 
are so careful to avoid excess that we can not be 
earnest enough to show any due valuation of our ob- 
ject. See what stress of exertion we display in the 
pursuit of gain—what sharpness of attention we prac- 
tice, what watching of opportunities, what indefatiga: 

14* 


162 THE PROPERTY RIGHT 


ble contriving, what persistency. See, again, how we 
put ourselves to the work in a political campaign. 
What mean these great assemblages, these nightly 
harangues, these processions, these thousand and one 
consultations at the corners of the streets—all this 
heavy strain of action, what does it mean? Simply 
that a great cause is earnestly pressed according to its 
supposed value. The object is to gain voices or votes, 
and the words are, “ yours but not you.” What, then 
shall be the stress of any single man, or church of 
God, when the point is to gain everlastingly the men 
themselves? If there is so little fear of excess when 
we are after votes, how much less should there be 
when we are after the men. The intensest energy ina 
work so nearly divine, the most earnest endeavor, the 
wisest adjustment of means in the possible compass of 
invention, labor in season and out of season, supplica- 
tions that are groanings with Christ in his Gethsemane 
—these are the way of all true Christian men and as- 
semblies. 

To this end, my brethren, consider well that you are 
set to gain a property in every man yousave. In 
some dearest, truest sense, he is to be yours forever, to 
own you as his benefactor, and to be your crown of 
rejoicing, having your life entered into and working 
through his forever. Taking it as the law of his 
ministry—‘ not yours but you,” what a glorious com- 
pany did our great Apostle gather in to be with him, 
to pack, as it were, the heavenly mansions, and be in 
the everlasting unfolding of their life and blessedness, 


WE ARE TO GET IN SOULS. 163 


his ever increasing property! What a world of 
riches, too, is that great commonwealth of blessing to 
be, where so many ties of mutual ownership and bene 
faction are to exist forever. There are mothers that 
have brought in their children, pastors that have 
brought in their flocks, teachers that have won their 
classes, employers that have gained their employed, 
young friends that have led in their comrades, sick 
and solitary, whose prayers have brought salvation to 
strangers or the great in high places, who never knew 
till now their nameless benefactors. These all have 
taken possession, so to speak, of one another. As 
they learned to say ‘‘not yours but you,” so they are 
allowed henceforth, in loving thought, to say, “ these 
are mine.” And this adjective mine, how steadily are 
we educated into it; as if it were God’s purpose, first 
of all, to waken the sense of property in us, that we 
may be set every one upon the endeavor to win a pos- 
session for eternity. This property notion that puts 
us delving, striving, going to the death for gain, is 
only to be converted, not to be disappointed. A bub- 
ble in itself, it foreshadows an everlasting reality. 
For when it is fulfilled in the grand, eternal future to 
which we are going, we shall find that heaven itself is 
but a glorious, enduring ownership. 

Consider, also, how this double-acting property re- 


lation holds good, even between Christ and his people. 


* Not yours but you” is the principle that brings him 
into the world. Understand how a perfectly good, 
great, unselfish, loving and true mind will value a 


164 THE PROPERTY RIGHT 


populous world of mind in ruins, and the seeming dis- 
proportion of the cross vanishes. And when we hear 
him say and repeat, in words of visible endearment, 
“those whom thou hast given me,” we can see that he 
is counting over his property beforehand. For this he 
travels in the greatness of his strength, for this he is 
red in his apparel, and treads the wine-press alone. 
All the amazing stress of his sacrifice is crowded on 
by the immense valuation he has of the prize to be 
gained. And then when he has made that gain, and 
his everlasting property in those that were given him 
is established by the purchase of his sacrifice, what 
stronger tap-root of confidence could we have than to 
hear him add—* and no man shall pluck them out of 
my hand.” We can even see that he would sooner 
die again than give us up. O, thou timid, misgiving 
soul, distrust thyself as thou wilt, only do not distrust 
the unalterable ownership of thy Master! As thou 
art Christ’s sure property, given him before the 
foundation of the world, that foundation will sooner 
break down than his strong title of possession. Did 
he not also say—‘‘ I will that those whom thou hast 
given me be with me where I am?” What, then, 
shall we answer, each one for himself, but this—“ I 
will, O Master and Lord, that I be with thee where 
thou art—have me thus for thy possession, and I ask 
no more.” 

And yet there is more; for as there is no exclusive 
right in the benevolent properties—all brothers, in all 
circles of brotherhood, owning each other—so it is 


— 


WE ARE TO GET IN SOULS. 165 


given us to own even Jesus himself; to say, “ O Christ 
thou art mine,”—“ My Lord and my God,”—* Whom 
have I in heaven but thee.” Having thee, I can 
easily renounce, or lose, all things beside. I would 
not care to possess, even if I could, thy stars. Enough 
that I shall possess the internal contents and the 
bosom furniture of thy divine excellence; the sea-full 
of thy love wherein the leviathans of thy purposes 
play; the splendors of thy intelligence, which make 
my day eternal without any sun; thy great will which 
makes me sufficient in power; all thy goodness and 
beauty, all thy plans and dispositions; and shall I not 
be so established forever—let me humbly dare to 
speak it—in the dear blessed ownership of Christ and 
his kingdom ? 


Lite Ge 
THE DISSOLVING OF DOUBTS. 


“And I have heard of thee, that thou canst make interpretations and 
dissolve doubts.” —Dan. 5: 16. 


Dovprts and questions are not peculiar to Nebuchad- 
nezzar, but they are the common lot and heritage of 
humanity. They vary in their subjects and times, but 
we have them always on hand. We live just now in 
a specially doubting age, where almost every matter 
of feeling is openly doubted, or, it may be, openly de- 
nied. Science puts every thing in question, and liter- 
ature distils the questions, making an atmosphere of 
them. We doubt both creation and Creator; whether 
there be second causes or only primal causes running 
ab eterno in eternum ; whether God is any thing more 
than the sum of such causes; whether he works by will 
back of such causes ; whether he is spirit working su- 
pernaturally through them ; whether we have any per- 
sonal relation to him, or he tows. And then, when we 
come to the matter of revelation, we question the fact 
of miracles and of the incarnation. We doubt free 
agency and responsibility, immortality and salvation, 
the utility of prayer and worship, and even of repent- 
ance for sin. And these sweeping, desolating doubts 

(166) 


THE DISSOLVING OF DOUBTS. 167 


run through all grades of mind, all modes and spheres 
of life, as it were telegraphically, present as powers 
of the air to unchristen the new-born thoughts of re- 
ligion as fast as they arrive. The cultivated and ma- 
ture have the doubts ingrown they know not how, and 
the younger minds encounter their subtle visitations 
when they do not seek them. And the more active- 
minded they are, and the more thoughts they have on 
the subject of religion, the more likely they are, (un- 
less anchored by true faith in God,) to be drifted away 
from all the most solid and serious convictions, even 
before they are aware of it. Their mind is ingenuous, 
it may be, and their habit is not over-speculative, cer- 
tainly not perversely speculative; they only have a 
great many thoughts raising a great many questions 
that fly, as it were, loosely across their mental land- 
scape, and leave no trace of their passage—that is, 
none which they themselves perceive,—and yet they 
wake up by and by, startled by the discovery that they 
believe nothing. They can not any where put down 
their foot and say, “here is truth.” And it is the 
greatest mystery to them that they consciously have 
not meant to escape from the truth, but have, in a cer- 
tain sense, been feeling after it. They have not been 
ingenious in their questions and arguments. They 
have despised all tricks of sophistry, they have only , 
been thinking and questioning as it seemed to be quite 


right they should. And yet, somehow, it is now be- 


come as if all truth were gone out, and night and no- 
where had the world. The vacuity is painful, and 


168 THE DISSOLVING OF DOUBTS. 


they are turned to a wrestling with their doubts, which 
is only the more painful that they wrestle, as it were, 
in mid-air, unable to so much as touch ground any 
where. 

The point I am sketching here is certainly in the 
extreme, and yet it is an extreme often reached quite 
early, and one toward which all young minds gray- 
itate, as certainly as they consent to live without God 
and carry on their experience, steadied by no help from 
the practical trust of religion. Probably some of you, 
my friends here before me, are at one point of doubt or 
unbelieving, and some at another; I sincerely hope 
that none of you have reached the dark extreme just 
described. But whatever point you have reached, I 
propose for my object this morning to bring in what I 
can of countervailing help. I shall speak of the dis- 
solving of your doubts, showing how you may have 
them dissolved in all their degrees and combinations. 
If they do not press you, or at all trouble you; if you 
like to have them, and amuse yourself in what you 
count the brilliancy of their play, if you love to be in- 
ventive and propagate as many and plausible as you 
may, I have nothing for you. But if you want to 
know the truth—all truth—and be in it, and have all 
the fogs of the mind cleared away, I think I can tell 
you in what manner it may, without a peradventure, 
be done. Shall I go on? Give me then your atten- 
tion, nothing more. I shall not ask you to surrender 
up your will or suppress your intelligence, would not 
even consent to have you force your convictions or 


7 


THE DISSOLVING OF DOUBTS. 169 


opinions. All that I ask is a real desire to find the 
truth and be in it. 

Before proceeding, however, in the principal matter 
of the subject, it may be well to just note the three 
principal sources and causes whence our doubts arise, 
and from which they get force to make their assault. 
They never come of truth or high discovery, but al- 
ways of the want of it. 

In the first place, all the truths of religion are inhe- 
rently dubitable. They are only what are called prob- 
able, never necessary truths like the truths of geome- 
try or of numbers. In these we have the premises in 
our very minds themselves. In all other matters we 
have the premise to find. And there is almost no 
premise out of us that we do not some time or other 
doubt. Weeven doubt our senses, nay, it takes a very 
dull, loose-minded soul, never to have, or to have had 
a doubt of the senses. Now this field of probable truth 
is the whole field of religion, and of course it is 
competent for doubt to cover it in every part and 
item. 

In the second place, we begin life as unknowing 
creatures that have every thing to learn. We grope, 
and groping is doubt; we handle, we question, we 
guess, we experiment, beginning in darkness and 
stumbling on towards intelligence. We are ina doom 
of activity, and can not stop thinking—thinking every 
thing, knocking against the walls on every side; trying 
thus to master the problems, and about as often getting 
mastered by them. Yeast works in bread scarcely 

15 


oo 


170 THE DISSOLVING OF DOUBTS. 


more blindly. When I draw out this whole conecption 
of our life as it is, the principal wonder, I confess, is 
that we doubt so little and accept so much. 

And, again, thirdly, it is a fact, disguise it as we can, 
or deny it as we may, that our faculty is itself in dis 
order. A broken or bent telescope will not see any 
thing rightly. A filthy window will not bring in even 
the day as itis. So a mind wrenched from its true 
lines of action or straight perception, discolored and 
smirched by evil, will not see truly, but will puta 
blurred, misshapen look on every thing. Truths will 
only be as good as errors, and doubts as natural as 
they. 

Now it will be seen that as long as these three 
sources or originating causes of doubt continue, doubts 
will continue, and will, in one form or another, be mul- 
tiplied. Therefore, I did not propose to show how 
they may be stopped, for that is impossible, but only 
how they may be dissolved, or cleared away. I may 
add, however, that the method by which they are to be 
dissolved, will work as well preventively as remedially ; 
for though it will not stop their coming, it will stop 
their coming with damage and trouble to the mind, 
and keep it clear for all steadiest repose and highest 
faith in religion. 

And the first thing here to be said, and it may be 
most important, is negative; viz., that the doubters 
never can dissolve or extirpate their doubts by inqui- 
ry, search, investigation, or any kind of speculative en- 
deavor. They must never go after the truth to merely 


THE DISSOLVING OF DOUBTS. 171 


find it, but to practice it and live by it. It is not 
. enough to rally their inventiveness, doing nothing to 
polarize their aim. To be simply curious, thinking of 
this and thinking of that, is only a way to multiply 
doubts; for in doing it they are, in fact, postponing all 
the practical rights of truth. They imagine, it may 
be, that they are going first, to settle their questions, 
_ and then, at their leisure, to act. As if they were go- 
ing to get the perfect system and complete knowledge 
of truth before they move an inch in doing what they 
know! The result is that the chamber of their brain 
is filled with an immense clatter of opinions, questions, 
arguments, that even confound their reason itself. 
And they come out wondering at the discovery, that 
- the more they investigate the less they believe! Their 
very endeavor mocks them,—just as it really ought. 
For truth is something to be lived, else it might as well 
not be. And how shall a mind get on finding more 
truth, save as it takes direction from what it gets; how 
make farther advances when it tramples what it has 


by neglect? You come upon the hither side of a vast 
intricate forest region, and your problem is to find your 
way through it. Will you stand there inguiring and 
speculating forty years, expecting first to make out 
the way? or, seeing a few rods into it, will you go on 
as far as you see, and so get ability to see a few rods 
farther? proceeding in that manner to find out the un- 
__ known, by advancing practically in the known. 

No, there is no fit search after truth which does not, 

first of all, begin to live the truth it knows. Alas! 


172 THE DISSOLVING OF DOUBTS. 


to honor a little truth is not in the doubters, or they do 
not think of it, and so they dishonor beforehand all the 
truth they seek, and swamp it, by inevitable conse- 
quence, in doubts without end. 

Dropping now this negative matter, we come to the 
positive. There is a way for dissolving any and all 
doubts,—a way that opens at a very small gate, but 
widens wonderfully after you pass. Every human soul, 
at a certain first point of its religious outfit, has a key 
given it which is to be the open sesame of all right dis- 
covery. Using this key as it may be used, any lock is 
opened, any doubt dissolved. Thus every man acknowl- 
edges the distinction of right and wrong, feels the real- 
ity of that distinction, knows it by immediate con- 
sciousness even as he knows himself. He would not 
be a man without that distinction. It is even this 
which distinguishes him from the mere animals. Hay- 
ing it taken away, he would, at the same instant, drop 
into an animal. I do not say, observe, that every man 
is clear as to what particular things may be fitly called 
right and what wrong. There is a great disagreement 
here in men’s notions; what is right to some, or in 
some ages and some parts of the world, being wrong to 
others, in other times and countries. I only say that 
the distinction of dea or general principle is the same in 
all ages and peoples, without a shade of difference. 
Their ideas of space and time are not more perfectly 
identical. So far they are all in the same great law; 
constituted, in that fact, men, moral beings, subjects 
of religion. Their whole nature quivers responsively 


to this law. To be in the right, and of it, to mean the 

: right, and swear allegiance to it forever, regardless of 
cost, even though it be the cost of life itself,—they can 
as well disown their existence as disown this law. 
There may be now and then a man who contrives to 
raise a doubt of it, and yet, driven out with rods, it 

_ will come back, a hundred times a day, and force 
its recognition; especially if any one does him a 
wrong. 

Here, then, is the key that opens every thing. And 
the only reason why we fall into so many doubts, and 
get unsettled by our inquiries, instead of being settled 
by them as we undertake to be, is that we do not be- 
gin at the beginning. Of what use can it be for a man 

- to push on his inquiries after truth, when he throws 
away, or does not practically honor, the most funda- 


THE DISSOLVING OF DOUBTS. 173 


mental and most determinating of all truths? He goes 
after truth as if it were coming in to be with him in 
wrong! even as a thief might be going after honest 
company in stolen garments. How can a soul, unpo- 
larized by wrong, as a needle by heat, settle itself in 
the poles of truth? or who will expect a needle, hung 
in a box of iron, turning every way and doubting at 
every point of compass, to find the true North? But 
a right mind has a right polarity, and discovers right 
things by feeling after them. Not all right things in 
a moment, though, potentially, all in a moment; for its 
very oscillations are true, feeling after only that which 
is, to know it as it is. 

The true way, therefore, of dissolving doubts, as J 

15* 


174 THE DISSOLVING OF DOUBTS. 


just now said, is to begin at the beginning, and do the 
first thing first. Say nothing of investigation, till you — 
have made sure of being grounded everlastingly, and — 
with a completely whole intent, in the principle of 
right doing as a principle. And here it is, let me say, 
that all unreligious men are at fault, and often without — 
knowing, or even suspecting it. They do right things 
enough in the out-door, market sense of the term, and 
count that being right. But let them ask the ques- 
tion, “ Have I ever consented to be, and am I really 
now, in the right, as in principle and supreme law; to 
live for it, to make any sacrifice it will cost me, to be- 
lieve every thing it will bring me to see, to be a confess- 
or of Christ as soon as it appears to be enjoined upon 
me, to go on a mission to the world’s end, if due con- 
viction sends me, to change my occupation for good 
conscience’ sake, to repair whatever wrong I have 
done to another, to be humbled, if I should before my 
worst enemy, to do complete justice to God, and, if I 
could, to all worlds?’—in a word, to bein wholly right 
intent, and have no mind but this forever?” Ah, how 
soon do they discover possibly, in this manner, that 
they are right only so far as they can be, and not be at 
all right as in principle—right as doing some right 
things, nothing more. Of course, they are not going 
to be martyrs in this way, and they have not had a 
thought of it. 

After this there is not much use in looking farther, 
for if we can not settle ourselves practically in this 
grand. first law which we do know, how can we hope 


THE DISSOLVING OF DOUBTS. 175 


to be settled in what of truth we donot? Are we 
ready, then, to undertake a matter so heavy? for the 
struggle it requires will be great, as the change itself 
must be well nigh total; a revolution so nearly com- 
plete, that we shall want every help we can get. And 
let us not be surprised by the suggestion that God, 
perchance, may come to our help unseen, when we do 
not so much as know how to believe in him, only 
let it occur to us how great a comfort it should 
be, to have a God so profoundly given to the right; 
for that subtle gleam of sympathy may be itself a 
kind of prayer,—prayer that he will answer before 
the call is heard. And then, as certainly as the 
new right mind begins, it will be as if the whole 
heaven were bursting out in day. For this is what 
Christ calls the single eye, and the whole body is iney- 
itably full of light. How surely and how fast fly away 
the doubts, even as fogs are burned away by the sun. 
Now to make this matter plain, I will supposea case _ 
in which the dissolving of doubt in this manner is illus- 
trated. Suppose that one of us, clear all the vices, 
having a naturally active-minded, inquiring habit, oc- 
eupied largely with thoughts of religion,—never mean- 
ing to get away from the truth, but, as he thinks, to 
find it, only resolved to have a free mind, and not al- 
low himself to be carried by force or fear or any thing 
but real conviction,—suppose that such a one going on 
thus, year by year, reading, questioning, hearing all the 
while the gospel in which he has been educated, some- 
times impressed by it, but relapsing shortly into greater 


176 THE DISSOLVING OF DCUBTS. 


doubt than before, finds his religious beliefs wearing 
out, and vanishing, he knows not how, till finally he 
seems to really believe nothing. He has not meant to 
be an atheist, but he is astonished to find that he has 
nearly lost the conviction of God, and can not, if he 
would, say with any emphasis of conviction that God 
exists. The world looks blank, and he feels that exist- 
ence.is getting blank also to itself. This heavy charge 
of his possibly immortal being oppresses him, and he 
asks again and again, “ What shall Ido with it?” His 
hunger is complete, and his soul turns every way for 
bread. His friends do not satisfy him. His walks drag 
heavily. His suns do not rise, but only climb. A kind 
of leaden aspect overhangs the world. Till finally, 
pacing his chamber some day, there comes up suddenly 
the question,—“ Is there, then, no truth that I do be- 
lieve ?—Yes, there is this one, now that I think of it, 
there is a distinction of right and wrong, that I never 
doubted, and I see not how I can; I am even quite sure 
of it.” Then, forthwith, starts up the question, “ Have 
I, then, ever taken the principle of right for my law? 
I have done right things as men speak, have I ever 
thrown my life out on the principle to become all it re- 
quires of me? No,I have not, consciously I have 
not. Ah! then here is something for me todo! No 
matter what becomes of my questions,—nothing ough$ 
to become of them, if I can not take a first principle so 
inevitably true and live in it.” The very suggestion 
seems to be a kind of revelation; it is even a relief to 
feel the conviction it brings. “ Here, then,” he says, 


THE DISSOLVING OF DOUBTS. 177 


“will I begin. If there is a God, as I rather hope 
there is, and very dimly believe, he is a right God. If 
I have lost him in wrong, perhaps I shall find him in 
right. Will he not help me, or, perchance, even be dis- 
covered to me?” Now the decisive moment is come. 
He drops on his knees, and there he prays to the dim 
God dimly felt, confessing the dimness for honesty’s 
sake, and asking for help, that he may begin a right 
life. He bows himself on it as he prays, choos- 
ing it to be henceforth his unalterable, eternal en- 
deavor. 

It is an awfully dark prayer, in the look of it, but 
the truest and best he can make,—the better and 
more true that he puts no orthodox colors on it; and 
the prayer and the vow are so profoundly meant that 
his soul is borne up into God’s help, as it were by some 
unseen chariot, and permitted to see the opening of 
heaven even sooner than he opens his eyes. He rises 
and it is as if he had gotten wings. The whole sky is 
luminous about him,—it is the morning, as it were, of 
anew eternity. After this, all troublesome doubt of 
God’s reality is gone, for he has found Him! A being 
so profoundly felt, must inevitably be. 

Now this conversion, calling it by that name, as we 
properly should, may seem, in the apprehension of 
some, to be a conversion jor the gospel and not iit or 
by it; a conversion by the want of truth, more than 
by the power of truth. But that will be a judgment 
more superficial than the facts permit. No, it is ex- 
actly this: it is seeking first the kingdom of God, and 


178 THE DISSOLVING OF DOUBTS. 


his righteousness,—exactly that and nothing less. And 
the dimly groping cry for help—what is that but a feel- 
ing after God, if haply it may find him, and actually 
finding him not far off. And what is the help obtain- 
ed, but exactly the true Christ-help? And the result 
—what also is that, but the Kingdom of God within ; 
righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost? 


[There is a story lodged in the little bedroom of 
one of these dormitories, which, I pray God, his re- 
cording angel may note, allowing it never to be lost. ]* 


Now the result will be that a soul thus won to its 
integrity of thought and meaning, will rapidly clear 
all tormenting questions and difficulties. They are not 
all gone, but they are going. Revelation, it may be, 
opens some troublesome chapters. Preaching some- 
times stumbles the neophyte, when he might better 
be comforted by it. The great truths of God often 
put him ina maze. The creation story, the miracles, 
the incarnation, the trinity, the relations of justice and 
mercy,—in all these he may only see, for a time, men 
walking that have the look of trees. But the ship is 
launched, he is gone to sea, and has the needle on 
board. He is going now to sell every thing for the truth, 
—not the truth to keep as a knowledge, but the truth 
to live by. He is going henceforth to be concentered 
in the right, nay, the righteousness itself of God ; and 
his prayers he will be hanging, O how tenderly, on 


FO OG: ‘ f 


THE DISSOLVING OF DOUBTS. 179 


God, for the inward guidance of his Spirit. He will 
undertake shortly some point that is not cleared at 
once by the daylight of his new experience, and will, 
by and by, master it. That will give him courage to 
undertake shortly another, and he will go to it with 
new appetite. And so he will go on, not afraid to 
have questions even to the end of his life, and will be 
nowise disturbed by them. He will be in the gospel as 
an honest man, and will have it as a world of wonder- 
fully grand, perpetually fresh discovery. He comes 
now to the lock with the key that opens it in his hand, 
fumbling no more in doubt, unresolved, because he has 
no key. 


The menstruum, then, by which all doubts may be 
dissolved, appears to be sufficiently shown or provided. 
It only remains to add a few more promiscuous points 
of advice that relate to the general conduct of the 
mind in its new conditions. 

1. Be never afraid of doubt. Perhaps a perfectly 
upright angelic mind well enough might, though I am 
not’ sure even of that. We, at least, are in the fog 
eternal of wrong, and there is no way for us to get 
clear but to prove all things and hold fast. Make free 
use of all the intelligence God has given you, only tak- 
ing care to use it in a consciously supreme allegiance 
to right and to God. Your questions then will only 
be your helpers, and the faster they come, the better 
will be your progress in the truth. 

2. Be afraid of all sophistries, and tricks, and strifes 


v 


180 THE DISSOLVING OF DOUBTS. 


of disingenuous argument. Doting about questions, — 
and doubting about them are very different things. 
Any kind of cunning art or dodge of stratagem in your 
words and arguments will do you incalculable mischief: 
They will damage the sense of truth, which is the worst 
possible kind of damage.- False arguments make the 
- soul itself false, and then a false, uncandid soul can see 
nothing as itis. No man can fitly seek after truth 
who does not hold truth in the deepest reverence. 
Truth must be sacred even as God, else it is nothing. 

3. Have it as a fixed principle also, that getting into 
any scornful way is fatal. Scorn is dark, and has no 
eyes ; for the eyes it thinks it has are only sockets in the 
place of eyes. Doubt is reason, scorn is disease. One 
simply questions, searching after evidence; the other — 
has got above evidence, and turns to mockery the mod- 
est way that seeks it. Even if truth were found, it could 
not stay in any scorning man’s bosom. The tearing 
voice, the scowling brow, the leer, the sneer, the jeer, 
would make the place a robber’s cave to it, and drive 
the delicate and tender guest to make his escape at the 
first opportunity. There was never a scorner that 
gave good welcome to truth. Knaves can as well 
harbor honesty, and harlots chastity, as scorners 
truth. 

4, Never settle upon any thing as true, because it is 
safer to hold it than not. I will not say that any one 
is to have it as a point of duty to be damned, or will- 
ing to be, for the truth. I only say that truth brings 
often great liabilities of cost, and we must choose it, 


THE DISSOLVING OF DOUBTS. 181 


cost what it will. To accept the Bible even because it 
is safest, as some persons do, and some ministers very 
lightly preach, is to do the greatest dishonor both to it 
and to the soul. Such faith is cowardly, and is even a 
lie besides. It is basing a religion, not in truth, 
but in the doctrine of chances, and reducing the salva- 
tion of God to a bill of insurance. If the Bible is 
true, believe it, but do not mock it by assuming for a 
creed the mere chance that it may be. For the same 
reason, take religion, not because it will be good for 
your family, or good for the state, but because it is the 
homage due inherently from man to God and the king- 
dom of God. What more flashy conceit can there be, 
than a religion accepted as a domestic or political nos- 
trum ? 

5. Have it as a law never to put force on the mind, 
or try to make it believe; because it spoils the mind’s 
integrity, and when that is gone, what power of ad- 
vance in the truth is left? I know very well that 
the mind’s integrity is far enough gone already, 
and that all our doubts and perpetual selfdefeats 
come upon us for just that reason. All the more 
necessary is it that we come into what integrity we 
can, and stay there. Let the soul be immovable as 
rock, by any threat of danger, any feeling of risk, any 
mere scruple, any call to believe by sheer, self-compel- 
ing will. The soul that is anchored in right will do no 
‘such thing. There must, of course, be no obstinacy, 
no stiff holding out after conviction has come. There 
must be tenderness, docility, and, with these, a most 

16 


182 THE DISSOLVING OF DOUBTS. 


firmly kept equilibrium, There must be no gustiness 
of pride or self-will to fog the mind and keep right 
conviction away. 

6. Never be in a hurry to believe, never try to con- 
quer doubts against time. Time is one of the grand 
elements in thought as truly as in motion. If you can 
not open a doubt to-day, keep it till to-morrow; do not 
be afraid to keep it for whole years. One of the 
greatest talents in religious discovery, is the finding 
how to hang up questions and let them hang without 
being at all anxious about them. Turn a free glance 
on them now and then as they hang, move freely 
about them, and see them, first on one side, and then 
on another, and by and by when you turn some corner 
of thought, you will be delighted and astonished to see 
how quietly and easily they open their secret and let 
you in! What seemed perfectly insoluble will clear it- 
self in a wondrous revelation. It will not hurt you, 
nor hurt the truth, if you should have some few ques- 
tions left to be carried on with you when you go hence, 
for in that more luminous state, most likely, they 
will soon be cleared,—only a thousand others will be 
springing up even there, and you will go on dissolving 
still your new sets of questions, and growing mightier 
and more deep-seeing for eternal ages. 

Now, my friends, it would not be strange if I had in 
the audience before me all sorts of doubts, and varie- 
ties of questions, all grades of incipient unbelief, or, it 
may be, of unbelief not incipient, but ripe and in full 
seed. But I have one and the same word for you all, 


THE DISSOLVING OF DOUBTS. 183 


that is, look after the day, and the night itself will join 
you init. Or, better still, set your clock by the sun; 
then it will be right all day, and even all night besides, 
and be ready when he rises, pointing its finger to the 
exact minute where he stands, in the circle of his 
swift motion. Be right, that is, first of all, in what 
you know, and your soul will be faithfully chiming 
with all you ought to know. All evidences are with 
you then, and you with them. Even if they seem to be 
hid, they will shortly appear, and bring you their 
light. But this being right implies a great deal, ob- 
serve, and especially these two things :—First, that 
you pray for all the help you can get; for without this 
you can not believe, or feel, that you truly want to be 
right. Secondly, that you consent, in advance, to be a 
christian, and begin a religious life, fulfilling all the 
sacrifices of such a life, provided you may find it nec- 
essary to do so, in order to carry out and justify your- 
self in acting up to the principle you have accepted. 
- Undertaking to be right, only resolving not to be a 
christian, is but a mockery of right. You must go 
where it carries you. You must even be a Mahom- 
etan, a Jew, a Pagan,—any thing to have a clear con- 
science. There is no likelihood, it is true, that you 
will have to be either of these, but there is an almost 
certainty that you must be a christian. Be that as it 
may, you must consent to go where right conviction 
carries you. And there is even some proper doubt 
whether you can get out of this place of worship with- 
out being carried to Christ, if you undertake to go out 


184 THE DISSOLVING OF DOUBTS, 


as a thoroughly right man. For Christ is but the Sun 

of Righteousness, and you will assuredly find that, in 

being joined to the Rieut, you are joined eternally te 

him, and walking with him in the blessed daylight of 
his truth. 


xX. 
CHRIST REGENERATES EVEN THE DESIRES. 


“And James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came unio him, 
saying, Master, we would that thou shouldest do for us whatsoever 
we shall desire."—WMark 10: 35. 


Hap Christ ever been willing to indulge in satire, I 
think he would have done it here. These young gen- 
tlemen make a request so large, and withal so very ab- 
surd, that we at least can scarcely restrain a smile at 
their expense. ‘‘ Whatsoever we desire,” — what 
_ power in the creation could give it? And then it 
would be strange, above all, if they themselves could 
endure the gift. Still the Saviour hears them kindly 
and considerately, only showing them, when they 
come to state the particular thing they want, that 
even that thing—the sitting on his right and left— 
means perhaps a good deal more than they imagine; 
viz., that they drink of his bitter cup and be bap- 
tized with his fiery baptism. And when he finds them 
eager enough to answer still that they can do even 
that, he only turns them off in the gentlest manner, 
as children that he sees are looking after a toy which 
it would cost them a tragedy of suffering to accept. I 
think we can see, too, in his manner, that he regards 

16* (185) 


186 CHRIST REGENERATES 


them with a pity so considerate, simply because the 
absurdity they are in is nothing but the common ab- 
surdity of the whole living world. For what are we 
all saying, young and old, the young more eagerly, 
the old more indivertibly, but exactly what ‘amounts 
to the same thing, under one form of language or 
another—“ Let us have this, that, the other, any 
thing and every thing we desire.” Sometimes, if we 
could see it, we are really saying it in our prayers ; 
though if we should pause long enough upon the mat- 
ter to let our apprehension run a little way, I think 
we should almost any one of us begin to suspect that, 
having his particular desire, he might sometimes have 
more than he could bear, and might perfectly know 
that, if all of us could have it, we should make the 
world a bedlam of confusion without even a chance 
of order and harmony left. The first and most for- 
ward point accordingly which meets us in the con- 
sideration of this subject, is that— 


Our human desire, in the common plane of nature and 
the world, is blind, or unintelligent—out of all keeping with 
our real wants and possibilities. 

I mean by this, that we are commonly desiring 
just what would be the greatest damage to us, or the 
misery worst to be suffered, and do not know it ; that 
our tamest desires are often most untamed as regards 
the order of reason; and that we are all désiring un- 
wittingly, what is exactly contrary to God’s counsel, 
what is possible never to be, and if it might, would 


EVEN THE DESIRES. 187 


set us in general repugnance with each other, and so- 
ciety itself. j 

We are apt to imagine that, since we are con- 
sciously beings of intelligence, our desires must of 
course be included, and be themselves intelligent as 
we are. But we are not intelligent beings it happens 
in the sense here supposed. We are only a little in- 
telligent, in a very few things, and we do not mean 
by claiming this title, if we understand ourselves, 
much more than that we are of another grade in com- 
parison with the animals-—able that is to be intelli- 
gent if we get the opportunity, as they are not. We 
get room thus, large enough for the fact of a gen- 
eral state of unreason in our desires. After all they 
may be about as far from intelligence as they can 
be—possibly not more intelligent than our pas- 
sions, appetites, and bodily secretions are. In one 
view still, they are motive forces of endowment for in- 
telligent action, instigators of energy, purpose and - 
character, and if we knew them only as they move in 
their law, bound up in the original sweet harmony of 
an upright state, we should doubtless see them work- 
ing instinctively on as co-factors with intelligence, if 
not intelligent themselves. But, in their present wild 
way, we see them plainly loosed from their law by 
transgression—heavings all and foamings of the in- 
ward tumult—aspiration, soul-hunger, hate, ambition, 
pride, passion, lust of gain, lust of power; and what 
do they signify more visibly, than that all right har- 
mony and proportion are gone, as far as they are con- 


188 CHRIST REGENERATES 


cerned. Nothing has its natural value before them, 
because they are reeking themselves in all kinds of dis- 
order bodily and mental. They are phantoms without 
perception. Even smoke is scarcely less intelligent. 

That we may better conceive this general truth, 
revert, first of all, to the grounds out of which they 
get their spring. They do not come after reason com- 
monly, asking permission of reason, but they begin 
their instigations from a fund of raw lustings in the 
nature clean back of intelligence; rushing out as 
troops in a certain wildness and confused, blind 
huddle, that allows us to think of them with no great 
respect. Understanding well their disorder and con- 
fusion, we have itas a common way of speaking that 
reason must govern them—which supposes, clearly, 
that reason is not in them. And what do we better 
know, than that only a very partial government of 
them is possible ; that they swarm so fast and fly so 
far and wildly, that no queen bee of reason can possi- 
bly control the hive. 

The next thing to be noted is that they have no re- 
spect to possibilities and causes, and terms of moral 
award. Thus one man desires dry weather, and an- 
other rain, one office, and another the same office, one 
to own a house, another the same house, some to’ be 
honorable without character, some to be useful with- 
out industry, some to be learned without study. We 
desire also to own what we mortgage, keep what we 
sell, and get what nobody can have. We cypher out 
gains against the terms of arithmetic, and even pray 


EVEN THE DESIRES. 189 


God squarely against each other. We run riot in this 
manner all the while, even against possibilities them- 
selves. A child crying after the moon is in the same 
scale of intelligence. 

Causes again we as little respect. Having it asa 
clear test of insanity to be reaching after what every 
body knows eternal causes forbid, we are yet all the 
while doing it. We want our clocks to move a great 
deal faster in the playtimes appointed for childhood, 
and a great deal slower in the payment times ap- . 
pointed in the engagements of manhood. We want 
poor soils to bear great crops, indolence to be thrifty, 
intemperance to be healthy, and to have all good sup- 
plies come in, doing nothing to earn or provide 
them. 

Against all terms and conditions of morality, also, 
we want to be confided in, having neither truth nor 
honesty. We desire to be honored, not having worth 
enough even to be respected. We want the comforts 
of religion without religion, asking for rewards to 
come without duties, and that evils fly away which 
are fastened by our bad deserts. Of course our judg. 
ment goes not with the nonsense there may be in such 
desires, but they none the less make haste, scorning all 
detentions of judgment. 

We get also another kind of proof in this matter, 
by discovering afterwards how absurd our desires 
have been—that the marriage we sought would have 
kept us from a good one, and would have been itself 
a bitter woe; that the bad weather of yesterday, se 


190 CHRIST REGENERATES 


much against our patience, kept us from the car that 
was wrecked, or the steamer that was sunk by an 
explosion ; that the treachery of a friend, so much de- 
plored, saved us from the whirlpool of temptation inte 
which we were’ plunging; that the failure of an ad- 
venture we were prosecuting with high expectation, 
was the only thing that could have sobered our feel- 
ing, and prepared us to a penitent life. Sitting down 
thus, after many years, and looking back on the de- 
sires that have instigated our feeling, we discover what 
a smoke of delusion was in them, and how nearly ab- 
surd they were. How often has their crossing been 
our benefit, and how many thousand times over have 
we seen it proved by experiment, that they were blind 
instigations, thrusting us onward, had they not been 
mercifully defeated, on results of unspeakable dis- 
aster. 

There is yet another fact concerning them which 
has only been adverted to, and requires to be more 
formally stated ; viz., that they are not only blind or 
wild, as I have been saying, but are also a great part 
of them morally bad, or wicked; reeking with self- 
ishness, fouled by lust, bittered and soured by envies, 
jealousies, resentments, revenges, wounded pride, mor- 
tified littleness. Thus it was that even Goethe, no 
very staunch confessor of orthodoxy, was constrained 
to say—“There is something in every man’s heart, 
which if we could know,.would make us hate him.” 
And why notalso make him hate himself? Hateful is 
the only fit epithet for this murky-looking crew, that 


EVEN THE DESIRES. 191 


are always breaking into the mind, and hovering in 
among its best thoughts. Who that is not insane can 
think it possible to set them in right order, and tame 
them by his mere will? 

What then, is there no possibility but to be driven 
wild, and hag-ridden always by these phantoms? I 
think there is, and I shall now undertake, for a second 
stage in my subject, to show 


That Christ new-molds the desires in their spring, and 
configures them inwardly to God ; regenerating the soul at 
this deepest and most hidden point of character. 

' We commonly speak of a new-creating grace for 
souls, in the matter of principle, will, the affections, 
and we magnify our gospel in the fact that it can 
undertake a work so nearly central. I think it can 
do more, that it can even go through into what. is 
background, down into substructure, where the im- 
pulsions of desire begin to move unasked, and, by 
their own self-instigation, stir on all the disorders of 
the will and the heart; that it can go through, I say, 
and down among them, reducing them to law, and 
setting them in harmony with God as they rise. 

I do not mean by this that we are put on this work + 
of reduction ourselves, under the divine helps given 
us. Thus it may be conceived that we are only now 
to undertake, ourselves, more hopefully the govern- 
ment of our desires. But this matter of government 
begins too late, for it supposes that the desires to be 
governed, at any given time, are already broken loose 


192 CHRIST REGENERATES 


in their rampages, so that if, by due campaigning, we 
should get them under, there will always be new ones, 
not less wild, coming after. Besides, we do not see 
far enough to govern them understandingly, or in any 
but a certain coarse way. Such as are most plainly 
wild, vaulting as it were above the moon, we can well 
enough distinguish and repress. We can know some- 
thing, and can see a little way, but if we could see 
just one inch farther, how often should we stand back 
from a desire that seems to be quite wise, even as from 
a precipice. You would see for example that the 
horse you are desiring and bargaining for to-day, will 
-kick you into eternity to-morrow. And so a single 
stage farther of perception would, almost every hour, 
set you back in recoil from some other and still other 
desired object. We can do something, of course, by 
self-government in this matter, ought to do what we 
can, or what God will help us do wisely, but we want 
most visibly some other more competent and less par- 
tial kind of remedy. 

Sometimes a different kind of work is undertaken, 
that is supposed to be more adequate. A certain class 
of devotees, meaning to be eminently Christian, set 
themselves to the task of extirpating their desires ; 
counting it the very essence of perfection to have no 
desires. It is not as if they were merely in a ferment 
of misrule, but as if they were properties of nature 
inherently bad. Hence the attempt is, by abnega- 
tions, penances, macerations, poverties, mortifications, 
vows of solitude, and complete withdrawment from 


EVEN THE DESIRES. 193 


the world to kill them off, expecting that when they 
are dead sin itself will be dead, and all the goings on 
of the soul will be in purity, whereupon the vision of 
God will follow. Alas! it isnot seen that when these 
impulsive forces of the soul are extirpated, the corro- 
- sive will be left in as much greater activity. And the 
result is that the imagination goaded by remorse, 
breaks into riot, and the poor anchorite, how often has 
it been the fact, begins to see devils, and falls into a 
kind of saintly deliriwm tremens which is real in- 
sanity. 

Our gospel, as I now proceed to show, has a better 
way. It is never jealous of the desires, puts us to no 
task of repression, or extirpation. It proposes to keep 
them still on hand, as integral and even necessary 
parts of our great moral nature. In them it beholds 
the grand impulsions of activity, the robustness of 
health, the spiritual momentum of all noblest ener- 
gies, including even the energies of prayer itself. It 
even undertakes to intensify the desires, in the highest 
degree possible, only turning them away from what is 
selfish and low to what is worthy and good; giving 
promises for arguments, and saying, “ask what ye 
will,” “open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it.” 

And it is most refreshing to see how these two 
young men, James and John, who came to Jesus in 
their most absurd request, had afterwards got on, and 
had learned to have not smaller desires, but larger 
and more free, because now trained to be in God’s 
own order. They write books of Scripture under their 

i 


194 CHRIST REGENERATES 


names, and one of them says—“ Whatsoever we ask, 
we know that we have the petitions that we desired 
of him ;” “whatsoever we ask we receive of him, be- 
cause we keep his commandments, and do those things 
that are pleasing in his sight.” He was in God’s 
order, and now his desires went all to their mark. 
The other in his book is yet closer to the point, saying, 
“Tf any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God that 
giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not. But 
let him ask in faith, nothing wavering.” And again 
he lectures more at large—“ From whence come wars 
and fightings among you? come they not hence even 
of your lusts, that war in your members? Ye lust 
and have not: ye kill and desire to have,and can not 
obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye 
ask not. Ye ask and receive not, because ye ask 
amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts. Do 
ye think that the Scripture saith in vain the spirit 
that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy? But he giveth 
more grace.” Yes, more grace, all the grace that is 
wanted to set the soul in God’s harmony, and give it 
such desires as he can fitly grant. So these two 
greedy ones of the former day, we can see, had now 
made great progress. Living for so long a time in 
Christ, they had learned to have all their wild lust- 
ings put in accord with him, and so to have them lib- 
erally filled without upbraiding. 

Let us now see how this grace, which is called 
“more grace,” draws the desires, in this manner, into 
their true cast of relationship with God. 


EVEN THE DESIRES. 195 


-It is done partly, we shall see, by prayer itself; that 
is by prayer, helped as it is and wrought in by the 
Spirit of God. For how grand a fact is it, and how 
full of hope, that the Spirit of God has presence in us 
so pervasively, being at the very spring point of all 
most hidden movement in us, even back of all that 
we can reach by our consciousness. And there by his 
subtle, most silent, really infinite power, he works, 
configuring the desires, before they are born into con- 
sciousness, to the reigning order and will of God. So 
that when we know not what we should pray for, he 
helpeth our infirmities and, so to speak, maketh inter- 
cession for us, heaving out our groanings of desire, 
otherwise impossible to be uttered, into prayers that 
are molded according to the will of God. And so 
all prayer is encouraged, by promises that make an in- 
stitute of it, for the schooling and training of our de- 
sires, and drawing them into conformity with God 
and the everlasting reason of things. In this way of 
prayer we obtain our request, because we have been 
drawn closely enough to be in true chime with his 
will, and so to make an authorized pull on his favor, 
by our right-deserving; even as the bow-line from a 
boat, pulling on some object to which it is fastened, 
draws not so much the shore to it, as it to the shore.’ 
In this way it comes to pass, that souls which are 
much in prayer, and get skill in it, obtain their desires 
in great part, by learning how to have good ones mod- 
erated in the will. of God, being drawn so closely to 
him by their prayers, that bad ones fall away more 


196 CHRIST REGENERATES 


and more completely, and leave them petitioning out 
of purity. In passing through which process the 
Spirit helps them on, preparing them to prayer by the 
restored quality of their desires. 

Again, there is a power in the new love Christ be- 
gets in the soul, to remold or recast the desires, in 
terms of harmony with each other and with God. 
‘When. the supreme love is changed, being itself an 
imperial and naturally regnant principle, all the 
powers of misrule, including the desires, fall into 
chime with it. The love also is luminous and pure, so 
that no base underling, that would kennel back of 
knowledge in the mind, can hide from it. Besides, it 
does not have to govern or keep down, for it bathes 
and tinges all through, so to speak, even the desiring 
substance, with a color from itself. And then it fol- 
lows that, as the love is, so the desires will be. Loving 
my enemy, I shall desire only his good. Loving God 
I shall desire all that belongs to his will, and the ad- 
vance of his kingdom. And so, indirectly and by 
association, all the wild ferment of the corrupted na- 
ture, all the desires that belong to a sensual, earthly, 
selfish habit will be gradually changed, and the whole 
order, and scale, and scheme of desire will be re- 
placed by another. In this love even the drunkard’s 
appetite will be silent; for he will have only to 
abide in this love, to be free almost without a struggle. 
For it is a tide so full, that every basest longing is 
submerged by it. ‘‘ Breadth, length, depth, height, 
and to know the love of God that passeth knowl- 


EVEN THE DESIRES. 197 


edge,” says an apostle, “that ye might be filled with 
all the fullness of God.” And when the soul is full in 
this manner, it wants nothing more, because it can 
hold nothing more, least of all any thing contrary. 
All the wild wishes and vagrant longings settle now 
into rest, when the fullness of God is come. Unruly 
desires will of course begin to have their liberty again 
when the love abates, but abiding long enough in God 
as we may, they will even die. 

And just here it is that we duly conceive the 
Christian wise man. He is not any prophet or seer, 
neither is he any philosopher, but he is a man whose 
tempers and aspirations have found their equilibrium 
and right-keeping in the love of God. He is called 
wise because his judgments are not overset by the 
tempests of wild desire, and because all the gusty in- 
stigations of his nature are laid, leaving it open to the 
sway of right reason and of God’s pure counsel. 

Our gospel also brings us yet another kind of power 
by which we have our desire remolded gradually, 
without superintending the process ourselves. The 
Christian soul is a soul that by its faith in Jesus 
Christ is entered into a most dear personal fraternity 
with him. It walks with him as in a companionship, 
has its conversation with him, admires him all the 
while the more, because it gets a deeper knowledge or 
insight of what is in him, and so, by a kind of social 
contagion, takes the mold of his feeling, and comes 
into configurations of temper that accord with his. 
For what do we better know, than that. every man, 

Lie 


198 CHRIST REGENERATES 


especially every young person, who is allowed to join 
himself to any great, much admired character, and 
pass even years in travel and work, and private coun- 
sel with him, takes his type insensibly, and grows 
into a mold that is largely correspondent? He im- 
bibes, so to speak, the man, and that in matters too 
subtle even to be noted by himself. Not unlikely 
even his voice and accent will be affected, when he 
has no thought of it. How then shall it be with the 
disciple that walks in the dear great company of his 
Master? Suppose he has no thought of his desires, 
will he not be taking the type of his Master insensibly 
even in these? Is it too much to believe that all his 
inmost tempers and configurations will be recast, by a 
companionship so widely different from all mortal 
companionships, so unselfish and pure and true ? 

But suppose there still are left some traces of the 
old misrule and disorder, there is yet a will of Provi- 
dence put running for him, to reduce all these and 
finish him, as it were, in God’s order. Or it may be, 
if the sensual and low lustings of his former habit are 
already somewhat reduced, that there is too much 
eagerness left in his new Christian habit, and that he 
is sometimes rushing against God in it, even in his 
prayers. He loses patience, it may be, and is sorely 
galled that he can not make the good come to pass as 
he expected. Beaten back thus and discouraged, he 
protests that he is almost ready to give over desiring 
any thing; for what efficacy is there even in his good 
desires? Or he breaks out in a mourner’s grief, per- 


a 


EVEN THE DESIRES. 199 


haps, saying—“ Why should God take away my tal- 
ented and promising son, when I was going to make 
him such a blessing to the world? Or why my friend 
who was such a blessing already, and was so much 
wanted by us all?” By and by, after such sallies, it 
is discovered, perhaps, that the desires put forward so 
peremptorily were a good deal: more romantic or am- 
bitious, or subtly selfish than they should be, and 
could only be tamed by discipline. So God has us all 
the while in schooling under his providence, reducing 
our foolishness, and wearing out or worrying down 
our dictations. We roll up tumultuously, as the 
waves drive up their masses, break into foam and 
flatten out on the shore, but there is this very im- 
portant difference, that our desires tire down at last, 
under God’s strong discipline, while the waves never 
tire, and of course get no such benefit. So there isa 
grand tiring-out principle in this rule of Providence, 
by which we are all the while being schooled into 
God’s order. And in this manner the old Christian 
gets, at last, to have a wonderful wisdom in his ex- 
perience without even knowing it, because it is hid in 
his more chastened tempers, and never thinks of 
being a rational knowledge at all. 

Pressing on thus close upon his last limit, wrought 
in by Christ’s word and Spirit and Providence, his 
secret mind, if not perfectly conformed to God, gets 
to be so very nearly conformed, that when he drops 
into the river to cross over, and mounts the rampart 
on the other shore, his last shred of discord dies out 


200 CHRIST REGENERATES 


in him, and he is everlastingly free. Now that he sees 
Christ in clear vision as he is, he is thoroughly and 
completely like him. This now is the redintegration, 
the restored order of the desires—the most wonderful 
work, the deepest and sublimest achievement of man’s 
redemption. How it has been done, I have told you 
in a certain far off way—closer in a more interior way, 
I could not—for these roots of impulse and springs of 
movement are clean back of our consciousness. We 
never saw them, or descended where they are, we only 
see what wells up from them, and how they jostle us 
and drive us on, by impulsions first known when they 
are first felt. Come they whence? out of what murk- 
iness, or steam, or smoke, or night, or morning, or 
heat, or noonday fire within? Little as we know 
whence, we do at least know well their awful power, 
and how they drive on thick and wild, hurling aside, 
as in storms of the mind, all self-regulative order, will, 
and principle. They war in our members, they chafe 
and seethe, and boil, and burn all unsatisfied, all dis- 
appointed, and the man wears out, and dies at last 
of anarchy, not knowing why. They breed aims that 
are meagre and mean, which is about the worst mis- 
chief that can befall any man whether young or old, 
they blast the affections, they smirch and smoke out 
the principles, they both drug and stimulate the will, 
as by contrary instigations, they addle, and muddle, 
and turn to confusion about every thing in us that be- 
longs to the order of a well-ordered life. Being all 
in some sense misbegotten infestations of our sin— 


EVEN THE DESIRES. 201 


foul birds, jackals, hungry wolf-packs, let loose in 
the mind—they cost us about all the worry and tor- 
ment we suffer, and a great part of all fatal disaster 
beside. O if this terrible ferment could be stilled, 
settled in heaven’s order, the wildness and bitter non- 
sense taken out, what a smoothing of this world it 
would be! 

And this exactly is what our gospel undertakes and, 
as I have shown you, performs, or at least makes pos- 
sible. I know not how it is that the religious teachers 
have so little to say of the desires,when the gospel 
grace moves on them in so great stress of atten- 
tion. Perhaps it is because they class them with the 
merely instinctive motions, calling them irresponsible, 
and letting them be so ruled out of the account. 
Whereas they are at the very bottom, in one view, of 
all responsibility cast off, and the soul must be ham- 
pered, and galled, and fouled everlastingly by their 
misdoing, unless they are rectified. They are in fact 
the hell of the mind, and nothing is salvation which 
does not restore them. Clearly enough, we can not 
purge them or set them in order, by any course of 
training. We educate the intellect so as to harmonize 
it largely with nature, and law, and truth; we edu- 
cate the taste, the sentiment, and to a certain extent 
the affections ; also form, color, music; also the hand, 
the eye, the muscular force—schools on schools, col- 
leges on colleges we organize for these and other such 
kinds of training But we have no colleges for the 


202 CHRIST REGENERATES 


desires, and see not how we could have if we would.* 
For where shall such kind of training begin, and by — 
what course go on? Where are the diagrams? 
where is the logic? what objectivities are there to 
work by? Diogenes, I believe, was the only professor 
in this line, and he undertook to moderate the desires 
by his gibes—much as he might still a tempest by 
whistling it down. And yet it is but fair to say that 
he did what he could. Should he soberly reprove 
them, they would only laugh at him. Should he rea- 
son with them, what care have they for reason? In- 
venting a guage for them, where is the guage? who 
shall keep it? when shall it be applied? No discipline 
requiring eyes can enter intelligence into these blind 
factors. Not amenable to reason, or capable of it; 
able on the other hand to obfuscate all reason; able to 
be a robber talent as against the strength and fair suc- 
cess and peace of all the others; able, in short, as was 
just now intimated, to make a hell of the mind, where 
is the heaven? Here in Christ Jesus, have I not 
shown you? In him, coming forth to die, have you 
not, after all, the needed university, the sufficient and 
complete discipline? Drawing near to him, as he to 
you, and finding how to walk with him, will not even 
your desire be learning tenderly to say, ““ Whom have 
Tin heaven but thee, and there is none upon earth 
that I desire besides thee”? In this most difficult mat- 
ter come and see what he will do for you; or rather 
what he will not do. Indeed I know not any other 


*Y.1C..C, 


EVEN THE DESIRES. 208 


change in mind that can abate so many frictions, 
quell so many distractions, invigorate so great con- 
centration of thought in such evenness of repose ; 
nothing in short that will so much advance the possi- 
bilities of a good and great; life. 

And saying this I can not forget or keep out of 
mind the example of a once dear classmate and friend, 
who not long ago took his reward on high. He was 
not a brilliant man as we commonly speak, but there ~ 
was a massive equipoise and justness in the harmon- 
ized action of his powers that was remarkable to us 
all. The robust life he had in body and mind and 
moral habit, required him never to be gathering up 
his equilibrium, for it was never lost. He was not in 
his own opinion at that time a Christian, but he 
scarcely could have been a more sound integer, if he 
had been, to others. A few months after his gradua- 
tion, he wrote me that he was a good deal tossed by 
the question to what he should turn himself, as the 
engagement of his life. We had supposed that he 
would of course take his place in the law. But “the 
law,” said he, “is for money, and money I do not want. 
I have enough of that already, (he belonged to an im- 
mensely rich family,) therefore I am questioning 
whether I can do better than to put in my life with 
the best, even with Christ and his cause. I think I 
shall there be satisfied, and I do not see any thing else, 
where I can be.” The result was that his whole de 
sire fell into this current, and grew large upon him, 
getting volume to fill his great nature full; and he 


- 


204 CHRIST REGENERATES, ETC. 


went into his clearly divine call as a preacher of — 
Christ, with such energy and such visible devotion, — 
that he was pushed forward shortly into a high church. 
leadership that widely signalized his life, and made 
his name, in his death and before it, a name of great 
public honor. And I think of him now as probably 
the happiest, best harmonized, noblest-keyed man of 
all my acquaintance here. Would to God, my 
friends, that in such high example he might quicken 
you to follow. 

And if he should, let me tell you, in this short cata- 
logue of specifications, what the result will be. 

You will be wishing less and doing more. 

Your momentum will be heavier, and your impulse 
stronger. 

You will have a more piercing intellectual percep- 
tion. 

Your inspirations will range higher, because your 
desires do. 

Your serenity will be more perfect, as the sky of 
your mind is more pure. 

Your enjoyments will be larger and less invaded by 
distractions. 

You will have a more condensed vigor of will. 

You will have a great deal less need of success, and 
a great deal more of it. 

You will die less missing life, and more missed 
by it. 

All which may God in his mer¢y grant. 


MT. 
A SINGLE TRIAL BETTER THAN MANY. 


“ And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judg 
ment.” —Heb. ix: 27. 


Tr is a form of opinion frequently held, and received 
with increasing favor in these times, that there is to be 
some better chance given to bad men after this life is 
over ; a second or renewed trial, that may be expected 
to result more favorably; a third, possibly a round 
of trials, that will finally wind up all disaster, and 
bring the most intractable spirits into a genuinely per- 
fected character. This hope I could not encourage, 
because I see no benefit to come of it—nothing, in 
fact, but damage and loss. 

Observing this word “once,” and reading it more 
exactly, “ once for all,” we discover an aspect of final- 
ity in the declaration that has little agreement with the 
expectation referred to—implying, in fact, a fixed be- 
lief that our present probation, or state of trial, is to 
be both first and last, a trial once for all. That a 
great many thoughtful minds recoil from what appears 
to be the undue severity and rigor of such an appoint- 
ment is not wonderful. That God should give us but 
a single chance—one short trial—and hang every thing 

18 (205) 


206 A SINGLE TRIAL 


in our great life-problem on it, indicates, they imagine, . 
some deplorable fault of beneficence. It is as if he 
had set our trial as a trap to catch us. We begin it, 
they say, in a state of unknowing infancy, and scarcely 
get on far enough in knowledge to act our part wisely, 
when we are hurried away. If God is really willing 
to do the best thing for us, why does he not, will he 
not, give us a second trial, or a lengthened, partly re- 
newed probation ; that we may have our advantage in 
correcting the mistakes and repairing the wrongs of the 
first? Do we not learn a great deal from our first 
trial that could now be turned to account? And how 
often are we sighing, all of us, at the recollection of 
our misdoings, and wishing we could only go over life 
again. Every thing now would be differently done, we 
think, because we have learned so much from that ex- 
perience. We could hardly make any such bad mis- 
takes again as we have made, for we have seen exactly 
what results follow. The good opportunities we 
should now value and improve, the temptations that 
have had their mask taken off we should scornfully re- 
ject, the perils that before overcame us we should un- 
derstandingly face and vigorously master. Andso, try- 
ing life once more, we should come out safely, one and 
all, in a character fully consummated and established. 

If now this kind of argument were good, if it would 
be for our real advantage as respects the training of 
our character, God would certainly allow us to go over 
life again. He would give us, I verily believe, twenty 
or a hundred trials, if it were morally best for us, and 


BETTER THAN MANY. 207 


ig would secure a greater amount of good or holy virtue 
a as the result. But that it would not, I am firmly con- 
_ yinced, for reasons that I now undertake to set forth. 
_ Notice then: 
1. The most prominent and forward argument above 
_ referred to—viz., the very many valuable regrets pre- 
pared by our first trial, which ought not to be lost for 
_ want of another, such as will permit us to get our ad- 
vantage in them. Such regrets in abundance are, no 
doubt felt; but we must not make more of them than 
is to be made. A really solid, practical regret is next 
thing to repentance, and it will not wait, if we haveit, 
_ for a second trial to give us a chance of amendment; it 
will seize its opportunity now, and be forthwith con- 
- summated in repentance and the beginning of a right 
life. All such true regrets are different from the lazy 
_ kind, which want another life to ripen them. Being 
honest and true, they are prompt also, ready for the 
present trial, and looking for no other so far off as to 
let them evaporate. It is, in fact, one of the very pre- 
cise, undeniable objections to the plan of a second trial, 
that it isa way—the most certain way possible—of 
making all our bad regrets barren; for what can spoil 
_ their integrity more inevitably than that we are look- 
ing for some good time to come, when we shall turn 
- them to account more easily and with less distraction ? 
"The precise thing not wanted here is a second trial. 
The most unpropitious thing possible for a soul, wad- 
ing deep in the conviction of neglected opportunities, 
_ and abused powers, is the proffer of some posthumous, 


208 A SINGLE TRIAL 


second-life chance of amendment, that dispenses with 
the disagreeable necessity of prompt amendment now. 
Consider next : : 

2. As a matter partly coincident, the very self-evi- 
dent fact that, if we had two or more trials offered us, 
we should be utterly slack and neglectful in the first, 
and should bring it to its end almost inevitably in a 
condition utterly unhopeful. For the supposition now, 
as you observe, is not that a second trial is going to be 
sprung upon us in the after-state by surprise; but that 
it is to be such a kind of change or transition as we 
have argued for beforehand. We are to have it here as 
our deliberate conclusion that, however the present first 
trial may go, we shall at any rate have another. Be it 
so; let the argument be sure, and then, if a second 
trial is certainly to come, what shall hold us to any 
least concern for the first? The very promise itself is 
license and chartered recklessness. It even lies in the 
plan, we may say, that it shall be only a failure; a 
bad, foul chapter—any kind of chapter we may like in 
lust and wild caprice to make it. Put into language 
outspoken, it says, ‘‘ Plunge thyself uncaringly into 
evil. Fear nothing, be as irresponsible as you will; 
and, if it suits your fancy or your appetite, or the 
wild, bad impulse that takes you, be a devil. And 
then, when you have burned away your finest capaci- 
ties and highest possibilities of good in the hells of 
your lust, know that a second chance is coming in 
which you will easily make the damage good.” Ah? 
that second chance which is to mend the bad issues of 


BETTER THAN MANY 209 


the first, what is it but a bid for the misimprovement, 
moral abandonment, irrecoverable damage and sacrifice 
of the first? It is even doubtful whether Christian 
men enough could be raised in it to make up, for the 
present world, a church, or man its gospel offices and 
functions. Again: 

3. It is important or even quite decisive on the ques- 
tion, to observe and make due account of the fact that 
the second trial must, in any case, begin where the 
first leaves off. It is we, by supposition, that are to go 
into this second trial; not some other we, new-created 
and set in our place. We carry down with us all the 
old history lived, and the results matured, as they are 
garnered in us, and with that dismal outfit we begin 
again. Righteous men, if such there are, will not, of 
course, be kept back here in embargo to go through a 
second trial. Only to the bad will any such going 
over of the round again have any look of opportunity. 
And they must be thoroughly bad for that matter, else 
they will beg to be excused ; for such as are only less 
good than they would be, and have got some tolerable 
confidence of their future, will recoil from the new 
trial proposed, with unutterable dread. For one, I 
should not dare to choose it for my privilege. Ishould 
say, and I think a great many would join me in a like 
confession, that I consciously have made but a poor, 
sad figure, and seem rather to have slighted than duly 
profited by what my God has done for me; and yet, 
having gotten some benefit, such as gives me hope of my 
future, it is not enough that I might possibly do better 

19* 


210 A SINGLE TRIAL 


ona second trial; the experience I have had of myself — 
makes me rather afraid that I should do worse, even 
fatally worse. I can not risk it; indeed, I shudder at 
the possibility, in such misgivings that nothing short 
of God’s compulsions can ever bring me to it. And 
yet almost every man who is in the same general state 
—mortified and troubled by his own short-comings and 
the self-dissatisfaction he feels—has said, how often, 
with a sigh, not considering all it means, “O, I 
should love above all things to live my life over 
again!” No, I deny it; you would not. Coming 
to the real point, your courage would utterly 
fail. If you must begin where you leave off—as you 
must, if you are the same being—you would see no 
look of promise or charm of opportunity in the new 
trial permitted, but would draw back rather in utter re- 
vulsion. Possibly certain worn-out hacks of grace and 
judgment might be so far bereft of perception, as to 
think it a good thing to have a second turn thus under 
grace and judgment. But they must begin their sec- 
ond turn where they ended their first, with all their 
finest capabilities deflowered, and all their sins stuck 
fast in them—pinned through their moral nature by 
habit—with a dry, bad mind, and a heart poisoned by 
its own passion, and a wild, distempered will; and, 
having only this poor, battered, broken furniture, they 
must now set themselves to another chapter of trial, 
and make it a good one. They must, I say; they un- 
dertake to do it, but who can believe that they will? 
4. Considering the fact that our second trial must 


BETTER THAN MANY. 11 


begin where the first leaves off, we shall find it quite 


impossible to conceive the state supposed, in a way 


that does not make it utterly unpromising and very 
nearly absurd. We imagine, it is true, what a beauti- 
ful thing it would be to live our life over again, begin- 
ning at our childhood and carrying back into it all the 
experiences we have gained; and we are so much fas- 
cinated that we do not see the nonsense of it. Weare 
really conceiving the old spoiled cargo of an old bad 


_ life carried onward and put upon or put into a very 


young child; and are nowise shocked, either by the 


absurdity of the plan or the woe of the child. What 


now is the hapless creature going to do, or be, or how 
to carry himself? Not, certainly, to act his old in- 
fancy over again. To handle again, see, touch, taste, 
question, learn: in that way to stock the mind with 
symbols, and get in the timber of thought and feeling 
and fancy and action—which is the beautiful office of 
childhood—that is no more wanted. The timber is all 
in beforehand, and the supposition is that the child- 
soul, thus completely stocked already, will begin to be 
wise off-hand. But look again at this very absurd 
creature—a little child with a grown man’s wisdoms, 
follies, vices, sins, all packed in, to be the furniture of 
a certainly wise, good life! Why, the creature is not 
a child, if you call him so; but a tiny old man, who 
has worn out one life to no good purpose, and is stock- 
ing another out of it to begin again. The unknow- 
ingness, the innocence, the sweet simplicity of child- 


hood, the all-questioning observation—none of these 


912, A SINGLE TRIAL 


are in him; but only what a sinner knew and was, 
when he left off his former trial and died with the 
guilt of it on him. We hardly know whether to laugh — 
or be sad when we fall upon one of these premature 
old children, seeing him walk and hearing him talk — 
agedly, as if getting ripe in the green. But here we 
have the oldness without the innocence—a full-grown, 
rank-grown sinner that was, tottling again upon his 
tender feet; an old, sixty-year-old man, it may be, 
who has been actually set up as a child again to make 
his beginnings of wisdom ; all which he is to do by the © 
help of old miscarriages and sins, and it may be vices. — 
Childhood, they say, is the hopeful thing now for him ;— 
but hapless, utterly hapless creature, is the child ! : 
Clearly enough there is no such thing possible asa 
second trial beginning at the point of childhood; that 
is only a very absurd fiction that we raise when we are 
playing with our idle regrets. The second trial, if _ 
there be one, has, of course, no time of childhood in it. 
What we call the ductilities, flexibilities, tender possi- 
bilities of childhood and family training are gone by. 
Family itself is gone by, and the family spheres and 
affections—possible only in the terms of family repro- 
duction—are henceforth left behind. If conscious ties 
of fatherly and filial relationship remain, they remain 
as to persons who have already graduated in them, 
and have them only as in memory. What there is of 
society now, in this second state, is made up of beings” 
sole and separate; existing in full maturity and com- 
ing to their second trial in such characters and habits | 


BETTER THAN MANY. 2AS 


as they have shaped by their first. Almost of neces- 
sity, they will now be more selfish than ever; for, the 
unselfish industries that, in their first trial, were gener- 
ously occupied in providing a home—where hospitali 
ties should be dispensed to friends, and wife and chil- 
dren have their free supply—are now displaced by in- 
dustries that only make dry providence for self. They 
are now sole monks and nuns, we may say, in their 
conventual—only monks and nuns that have not found, 
as yet, their piety—coming hither to see, if possibly 
the dreariness of their grown-up, blasted condition 
may not do something for them. To any rational 
mind the prospect must be dismally discouraging. 
Probably the very best arrangement for a second 
trial that can be conceived will be made by simply giv- 
ing a new lease of life, that doubles the length of it 
here ; because, in that case, family feelings and con- 
nections, and the wonted social relations of time, will 
to some extent be continued. Add another thirty, 
fifty, or eighty years, and let the addition be the new 
trial. And what will be the result? Exactly the 
same that befel the old primeval race of reprobates be- 
fore the flood—viz., that having lived out their first 
five hundred years, they went on to live a second 
five hundred, and grow worse, instead of better, for 
their opportunity. If they wanted a second trial, they 
had it in the very best and most favorable conditions 
possible—far better and more favorable than if they 
had passed through death to receive it in the after- 
life; because they are not torn away from their kind, 


214 A SINGLE TRIAL 


or from the society of the good, but are permitted to 
enjoy, in some degree, all the tender offices of natural 
affection, and live in all the bonds of family providence 
and duty. And what, in fact, was proved by these — 
ante-diluvial men but that, when too much of time or 
trial is given, no stringent motive for decisive choice in ~ 
good is left. That last five hundred years was a very 
generous allowance, given, we might say, for the : 
amendment of their wretchedly bad life in the first 
five hundred; but, instead of amendment, it only — 
made them more completely reprobate. Too much 
trial, as they found, is damage—diminishing, and not 
increasing, the chances of a good result. 

Let us not be deceived here by a certain off-hand 
way of judgment; asif the great shock to be suffered 
in passing to another world, supposing that we are to 
have our second trial there, initiated the new experi- 
ence in a way to make it more promising. Thus, if we 
had actually gone through death, and begun to live 
again, having it shown us at God’s bar that we have 
made a dreadful issue of our trial, we should know our 
immortality, it will be thought, by experiment, and 
should have our sensibility awakened, as it were, by a 
shock of tremendous discovery; and so we should be 
set in a position of immense advantage, as regards the 
improvement of our new opportunity. Just as every 
malefactor, I suppose, who is caught in a crime, thinks 
that he shall certainly make an upright life, if now, 
this once, he can be respited and allowed another op- 
portunity. No! he will do no such thing; but will 


BETTER THAN MANY. 215 


pitch himself into any crime that is worse, about as 
soon as the shock of his arrest passes off, and he begins 
to act himself again. So, the prison convict goes his 
dreary round of work and solitude and silence, saying 
inwardly: “O, what a fool am Ito be here! Would 
that I could live my life over again, and I would not!” 
But he will be a most remarkable felon if, when his 
time expires, he does not go out to live his life exactly 
over again, making good his return within a short six 
months. So we think a man must assuredly become a 
saint, if only a second trial after death is given him: 
when it will turn out as a matter of fact that the 
saints are not made by occasions, opportunities, or ap- 
palling necessities, least of all where the noblest occa- 
sions and highest opportunities and most cogent neces- 
sities are already trampled and lost. Great shocks felt 
or crises past have no value as respects the begin- 
nings of a right life, save as they induce consideration, 
and by such consideration, make a new atmosphere of 
truth and feeling for the soul’s engagement and recoy- 
ery to good. But where consideration has so often 
been freshened by new providences and new revela- 
tions of God, and all best capacities of truth and feel- 
ing have been mocked and hardened by the abuses of 
a life, what magic is there to be in the strange environ- 
ments and discoveries of another state of being, that 
they are going to make men susceptible without sus- 
ceptibilities left, and turn them back to the right which 
they have lost the sense of, and from which they have 
all their life long turned uncaringly away? Their 


216 A SINGLE TRIAL 


shock of novelty in the transition will pass off in a 
very short time, and they will settle back into their 
wild, wrong habit, or willfully neglectful obstinacy, to 
choose and live and be precisely as before. Again: 

5. We have large material for the settlement of this 
question in our own personal experience and observa- 
tion. The likeliest times of duty and character we 
every day perceive are not the last or latest, but the 
times of youth, and probably quite early youth; for 
the capital stock or fund most wanted, as regards the 
finest possibilities of character, is made up of ingenuous 
feeling, sentiments unmixed with eyil-doing, unsophis- 
ticated convictions, free and pure aspirations, not of 
knowledges and wise sagacities, gotten by experience. 
These prudentials, these wise knowledges, are too com- 
monly bad knowledges, gotten by irrecoverable losses. 
If we say that a soul must have them, and that, haying 
gotten in a good stock of them on its first trial, it is, 
therefore, ready, on a second, to act wisely, we very 
certainly mistake. The sad thing is that a soul may 
know too much, obtaining knowledges that cost many 
times more than they are worth—such as come of self- 
damaging vices and the flagrant excesses of a bad life. 
All such ways of abuse create a knowledge, doubtless ; 
but what can these desolating knowledges, these burnt- 
in, branded curses of an old and eyil life, do for the 
immortal prospects of a soul? What, in fact, is the 
reason why a great many never can, or will, be- 
come true men of God here in this life; but that they 
have been going too deep into knowledge, and have 


BETTER THAN MANY. 217 


yotten too much experience at too great cost? Their 
knowledges are vitriol in their capabilities, eating out 
and searing over all the noblest affinities and finest as- 
pirations God gave them to be the stock and possibility 
of their future. And, therefore, it becomes a fixed 
conclusion with us that a man going into his trial shall 
make much of his unsophisticated age, and the noble, 
inborn sensitiveness of his early moral convictions, and 
be sadly, fearfully jealous of the wisdom he will get by 
their loss. This dreary and dry wisdom, that is going 
to be ripened by the practice of unrighteous years, can 
do little for the subject, however much he values it. 
His green first third of life has grand possibility of 
fruit ; his wise last third has probably none; and he 
draws himself very close upon the discovery of this 
fact as he approaches the end of his trial. The gold- 
washers of California, having passed their dirt once 
through the sluice, drop what they call “ the tailings ” 
below ; and sometimes they discover a very little gold 
in these, enough to pay for milling them over again. 
But the tailings of an old, bad life, which has yielded 
no gold on the first trial—who will go to work on 
them with any least prospect of success? As certainly 
as the man understands himself, he will see that his 
good possibilities will be gone, and will feel the least 
imaginable desire of a second trial, to mill over the 
dregs of his unblest experience. We ourselves, at 
least, know perfectly that nothing will come of it. 
But the new state expected, as some will perhaps 
remind us, is to be a state of punishment, and the 
19 


218 A SINGLE TRIAL 


pains of it, working purgatorially, must have great 
and decisive effects. Whereas, the very thing best 
proved by observation is that pain$ are nearly unrela- 
t:onal as respects the improvement of character. The 
fears of pain or penalty, so much derided commonly 
by these prophets of purgatorial benefit, might do 
something as appeals to consideration and prepara- 
tives in that manner of repentance; but pain, pain 
itself, nothing. It even disqualifies consideration. 
Pain is force, necessity, a grinding stress of abso- 
lutism, which may do something in breaking down a 
will, but never in the world was known to lift up a 
will out of weakness and evil, or ennoble it in the 
liberty and free ascension of good. Breaking down a 
will too, be it observed, is not conversion, but catas- 
trophe rather and death—just that which is the un- 
dergirding import and reality of second death. 
Observation gives us also another fact, which is 
even more impressive—viz., that with all that is said 
and assumed and argued for, and stiffly asserted, as 
regards the fact of a second trial hereafter, the whole 
world tacitly concedes, nevertheless, that no such new 
condition is, in fact, expected. For no unbeliever, no 
practically godless and really apostate believer, no bad 
man groaning under his vices, no drunkard writhing 
under his chains, no scofting Altamont overtaken by 
remorse, no human creature, whether uninstructed 
Pagan or best instructed philosopher, and (what is 
most significant of all) no loosest, largest freethinker, 
who asserts most confidently the faith of a second 


‘ 


BETTER THAN MANY. 219 


trial hereafter, goes out of life—I never heard of such 
a case—talking of the new chance now to be given 
him, and the high, free time he is going to have, in 
the more propitious trial that will suffer him to mend 
his defects and the consciously bad ways that. have 
corrupted him. All such advocates of a basement 
gospel, under the world and after the grave, convince 
themselves, by what they consider most indisputable 
and profoundly wise arguments, that their ultimation 
gospel, their posthumous salvation, will have power to 
mend all damage and smooth away all woes of char- 
acter begun; but when we look to see those deep 
natural instincts, which are always the spontaneous 
interpreters of our humanity, giving out their indica- 
tions, we find our believers in the underworld oppor- 
tunity clinging fast to life, as if they had no such 
faith at all in them, recoiling with instinctive shudder 
from death, and hailing never in glad welcome the 
better day now come to help their recovery—in which 
they may discover, as plainly as need be, themselves, 
that their arguments are one thing, and the verdict of 
their immortal, deep-discerning judgments another. 
They contrive how it is to be, they reason, they prom- 
ise, they encourage; but their always demonstrative 
nature nowhere runs up a flag of hope or gives any 
slightest indication. If the question be whether we 
are immortal, all the flags of natural hope are out 
streaming on every hill; but here expectation is dumb 
and shows no sign! 

But my object in this argument, drawing it here to 


220 A SINGLE TRIAL 


a close, is not so much to show that no second trial is 
to be had as to show the undesirableness of it. The 
matter itself is variously conceived. According to 
some, the wicked dead will be manipulated by long 
tractations in the better gospel of the pains, and will 
so, at last, be purified. According to others, they will 
be softened by long annealings under undeserved and 
extra-comfortable indulgences. By some it is believed 
that we were not made immortal by nature, and shall, 
therefore, cease altogether if we do not take hold of 
the eternal life in Christ to make us immortal. Others 
think we were made to be immortal, but fell out of 
immortality in our sin, and so are to quite die out if 
we do not forsake it. Some think that the future pun- 
ishment will itself wear out life in the bad, and finally 
make a complete end of it. I say nothing of these or 
any other varieties in the unbeliefs current. I say 
nothing of eternal punishment itself. One thing at a 
time, I am saying, one thing at a time; and then, 
having the one thing settled, as I think it now is, that 
no second trial hereafter is either to be desired or al- 
lowed, we have at least one very great point estab- 
lished, and can well enough allow the other questions 
to fare as they may. Make what you will of all these 
other questions, only have it as a fact made clear, 
which I think I have shown as decisively as it need 
be, that there is no possible advantage in a second 
trial promised beforehand, and that we are better off 
without the supposed advantage than with—have this 
clear, I say, and all the other last things may be left 


BETTER THAN MANY. ‘ D2 


to find their own settlement. Enough that there is no 
_ severity in having but a single trial, and that, if more 
than one were offered, we should do well to petition 
against it. Beyond a question, God, in giving us our 
one opportunity and no more, fixes this close limit be- 
cause one will do more for us than many. A greater 
number—two, ten, twenty—we could not have with- 
out unspeakable damage and loss. 

My argument appears to be thus ended, but I must 
not shut up the conclusion before it is ready. And is 
no better account then to be made, some one may ask, 
of the multitudes brought up under heathenism, or 
the drill of vice, or the taint of bad society? If there 
is no second chance for them, what chance have they ? 
J admit the seeming severity of their lot, but a great 
many things are none the less true because they seem 
to be severe. They are certainly not as unprivileged 
as we commonly think. They have all great light. 
They all condemn and blame themselves. The Spirit 
of God is with them. Some of them are truly born 
of the Spirit, and all might be. At any rate, all the 
arguments I have been urging to show the absurdity 
of a second trial, apply to them as to others—they 
have lost the tractabilities of childhood ; their staple of 
good possibility is worn out; they are gotten com- 
pletely by the opportunity of a new beginning. We 
must therefore leave them to God, certain that he will 
somehow mitigate any look of hardship in their lot. 
Only coming back here on our conclusion, that a see 

19* 


222 - A SINGLE TRIAL © 


ond trial can do nothing for them, and that whatever 
else may befall them this will not. 

And since we are looking at questions raised by 
doubt, I will not shrink from naming another which I 
can not so explicitly answer; viz., the seeming look 
of fitness in a second trial, for such as die in their in- 
fancy, er in youth so far unspent as to allow their 
carrying all best possibilities with them. Why should 
not such have a state given them, wherein they may 
unfold the character they are made for? And why, it 
may be asked in reply, were they not kept here to do 
it, where the advantages are so many and so evidently 
great? Perhaps we can as little answer one question 
as the other. However, we do not certainly know 
that any one of these infants and youths is not taken 
away to another and more genial state, there to be un- 
folded and trained, just because there are seeds of 
holy possibility already planted in them which might 
otherwise be extirpated. Their second state is not, in 
that case, their second trial any more than that of 
such as die in the full maturity of a sanctified habit. 
In these young-life souls there may certainly be rich 
stores of rudimental possibility, waiting for the edu- 
cating forces of a pure, sweet world, and it may be 
that so many are carried forward thus early, to make 
a larger infusion of unsophisticated character than a 
world of natures fully matured would reveal. 

Here, then, we are, my friends, face to face with our 
conclusion ; and a most serious one it is. It raises 
questions for us that we can not wisely push aside. 


BETTER THAN MANY. 22.3 


All of us are on our way, in our one decisive lifetime 
trial; and what are we doing with it? How is it 
turning? Some of us are but a little way advanced 
in it, and all the fine possibilities of our outfit are still 
on hand, scarcely if at all abridged. Great, my young 
friends, is your advantage, greater than if a hundred 
other stages of probation were promised you. Precious 
are the gifts, and precious are the moments as they fly. 
Act, every one, as if this eventful experiment were 
now on its way and passing rapidly. Allow no ex- 
pectation of another to beguile you. Bring in all 
your powers, and center them on this point of crisis, 
now so close at hand, knowing that God’s friendship 
can not be too soon secured. Others of your number, 
it may be, are getting farther on. A considerable or 
even principal part of their trial, it may be, is now 
gone by. Is it going well? If the tree is to lie as it 
falls, is it falling rightly? Have you good confidence 
of the end? Once for all, remember, once for all. 
And it is appointed unto men once for all to die, but 
after that the judgment. __ 


XII. 
SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. 


“Examine me, O Lord, and prove me, try my reins and my 
-heart.".—Ps, 26: 2. 


SELF-EXAMINATION is to many disciples a kind of 
first point in practical religion. We have also labored 
treatises from the press, in which set rules are drawn 
out, whereby the self-examining process may be skill- 
fully and scientifically conducted. In one way or 
another, this particular type of Christian exercise has 
come so near being the staple matter of a good life, 
that any common disciple called to address some 
brotherhood of strangers, will probably not get on 
many sentences without falling into the exhortational 
mood and beginning to say— Brethren, let us examine 
ourselves.” All which is the more wearisome that it 
signifies so little, and requires only the dryest kind of 
sanctimony to carry it on. We might very naturally 
presume, that there must be a great deal of Scripture 
for this kind of practice; and yet I do not know 
more than two passages that can be cited for it at all; 
one of which certainly has no such meaning, and the 
other of which has, at most, only a doubtful, or vari- 
antly shaded meaning, such as carries no sufficient 

(224) 


SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. yayj45. 


authority for the practice. The first named passage is 
the standing proof-text always cited—“ Examine your- 
selves whether ye be in the faith, prove your own 
selves.” (II Cor. 13: 5.) Where it will be seen, at a 
glance, by the mere English reader, and much more 
certainly by a scholar versed in the original language, 
that the apostle is simply referring the Corinthians 
here to their own new spiritual state, for proof that 
he has had a power in them for good, and has even 
transformed them inwardly by his ministrations. 
“Some of you pretend,” he says, “that I am weak, and 
bring no divine witness in my preaching. Since then 
ye seek a proof of Christ speaking in me, which to 
youward is not weak but mighty in you, examine 
yourselves [not whether, but if, or since] you are in the 
faith. Look into your own bosoms—know you not 
that Jesus Christ is in you, except you be reprobates.” 
He is not putting these Corinthians on a course of 
analytic self-study, or self-examination to settle the 
evidence of their discipleship. He has no thought of 
it, that is not his subject. His point is the great in- 
justice they are doing him, in running down the 
significance of his ministry. Therefore to correct 
them, he says, just look into your own bosom and you 
will see, that I have not been weak but mighty in 
you. He assumes their discipleship here, and is not 
putting them to the proof, but only drawing from it 
ex concessis, an undeniable test of his own apostleship. 
How this passage ever came to be applied, as it has 
been, to the testing and self-certifying security of 


226 SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. 


character, I really do not know. There could not be 
a plainer case of total misapplication. The other 
passage has a little more show of authority, but is not 
by any means decisive. It says: (I Cor. 11: 28,) 
“Let a man examine himself, and so let him eat ;” 
that is, ‘‘ discerning the Lord’s body.”. But the point 
here is to merely interpose a caution, an appeal of cir- 
cumspection, that will prepare the receiver of the 
supper to partake with reverence—let him put him- 
self to the proof sufficiently to make sure of this— 
there is no thought of putting him on a retrospective 
study and testing of his discipleship. At any rate, 
this would be a very doubtful construction, at the 
best, and as it puts the text wholly by itself, no other 
to that effect being found in the whole Scripture, it is 
certainly more reverent not to force it on a construc- 
tion so very insufficiently supported. 


To make these strictures is not altogether pleasant, 
for it may even shock the feeling of some, as if it 
were about the same thing as a virtual tearing out of 
the most approved foundations of piety. But I hope 
all such will be sufficiently comforted, on more ma- 
ture reflection, if I turn them over to God’s own way, 
in what is nearest at hand in the Scripture, and let 
them have it as a compensation for what has been 
taken away. The Scripture sends us to God for the 
examinations wanted, and not, in any case, to our- 
selves; knowing that when God proves us, we shall 
be thoroughly and truly proved, and that what as- 


a 


SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. 227 


surance he may give us, will be more than a guess, or 
opinion, or conclusion of our own, a veritable witness 
of God in our hearts. In this way the Psalmist 
prays—‘ Examine me, O Lord, and prove me, try my 
reins and my heart.” And again—“ Search me, O 
God, and know my heart, try me and know my 
thoughts, and see if there be any wicked way in me, 
and lead me in the way everlasting.” It was also an 
accepted Proverb even in the same view—“ The 
fining pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold, but 
the Lord trieth the hearts.” 

Here then—for I am going to speak to-day, not so 
much for impression as for instruction—here is the 
true and proper method of examination; 7t must be 
accomplished under and through the scrutiny, or inspecting 
power of God; we truly prove ourselves, when he proves 
us, and may rightly approve ourselves, only when he ap- 
proves us. Accordingly— 

1. I put forward as a fact, in unfolding the subject 
stated, that God certainly can examine us, and we can 
not, im any but the most superficial and incomplete 
sense, examine ourselves. For, in the first place, our 
memory is too short and scant, to recall or restore the 
conception of one in a hundred millions of our acts, 
leaving all the innumerable fugacities that make up 
our lives, to fly away and print no track of passage 
on the air passed through. In the next place if we 
could recall them, every one, we could never go over 
the survey of a material so vast, and multiplicities so 
nearly infinite, in a way to make up any judgment of 


228 SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. 


them, or of ourselves as represented in them. And 
then, in the next place, since the understanding of our 
present state is impossible without understanding all 
the causes in our action, that have been fashioning the 
character and shaping the figure of it, our faculty is 
even shorter here than before. Plainly enough om- 
niscience only is equal to that; which is the same as 
to say that God only is able, or even proximately 
able. Besides, when we propose to examine ourselves, 
we do not really mean much by it—only that we pro- 
pose to question ourselves by certain rules or tests, 
which in fact would touch and try almost nothing. 
We suppose indeed that we are going to make very 
serious and thorough work, when, in fact, we are only 
proposing to make up a sound verdict on our state, by 
two or three mere items of questioning. How differ- 
ent a matter to be examined by God, who knows all 
the historic connections by which our present state is 
linked to our past life, and is able to trace all the 
nicest shades of our character to the subtleties of ac- 
tion by which they have been sketched and colored in 
our minds. And yet, again, if we let go all inquiring 
into the ways in which we have grown to be what we 
are, the question, what we are, is scarcely less diffi- 
cult. How shall we fathom the abysses, and dis- 
tinctly conceive the infinite subtleties of our present 
state itself—all the more nearly out of understanding, 
or beyond it, because of the intricacies, disorders, and 
falsities, bred in us by our fallen condition. “Know 
thyself” we have all heard was given out by the phi- 


SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. 229 


losophers, as a first maxim of wisdom. And if they 
only meant that so we are to get the facts of our phi- 
losophy, they were right enough, for these can be got- 
ten, if at all, only by self-observation. But natural 
faculties and functions are one thing, moral states and 
spiritual affinities another, and if they imagined that 
a human creature under sin can know himself, in this 
latter method, or can so untwist the subtle threads of 
his motive, and meaning, and character, and want of 
character, as to really discover the exact import of his 
condition, they know little themselves of what it is to 
be men. How much deeper goes the scripture seer, 
when he protests “who can understand his errors, 
cleanse thou me from secret faults.” And again, 
“the heart is deceitful above all things, and des- 
perately wicked, who can know it?” 

But we are conscious beings, are we not, and what 
is that but to say that we are self-knowing beings ? 
But in simply noting things as they pass in us, which 
is all we mean by consciousness, we scarcely do more 
than to just have a look on the huddle of their transi- 
tions. We do not trace their complexions, causes, 
apologies, deserts, and all the other thousand things 
concerned in their character. We only look on as we 
might on the passing of a river, seen from its banks. 
We examine nothing. Thus if we speak of exam- 
ining our affections, they are so variable, and change 
ful, mixed with such multiplicities, and colored by so 
many crosses, that it is too much like examining the 
shadows of the clouds sailing, two or three tiers deep, 

20 


230 SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. 


under the sun. Or if we examine onr purposes or 
intentions, we shall know them a great deal better, by 
just noting what they do, and letting them go; in- 
deed we never know so little about our intentions, and 
their real desert, as when we are inspecting or handling 
them, to find how they go—in what temper, by what 
motive, and the like. Again, it most of all concerns 
us to know our tendencies, which are the deepest 
quality and drift of our nature, and they are so very 
subtle, and twisted together in combinations so intri- 
cate, and withal so destitute’ of harmony, that 
nothing less penetrating than the all-searching eye 
of God, can possibly discover, with any real pre- 
cision, what is in us. Besides, our knowing or ex- 
amining power itself is in a state of deep spiritual 
disorder, a creation that groaneth and travaileth in its 
own discords. And for that reason any effort of a 
man to adequately know himself, by a direct act of 
voluntary self-inspection, must be fruitless. He could 
examine God’s great and wide sea in fact from shore 
to shore and clean down to the bottom ooze, and 
judge it much more reliably, than he can the abysses 
of darkness, wrath, and storm, in his own disordered 
and tumultuating spirit. On the whole it is plain, 
whichever way we look, or whatever view we take, 
that God only is able really and discerningly to ex- 
amine the human soul or spirit. No man thinks it 
possible, by an act of self-examination, to comprehend 
the subtle and infinitely multiform processes going on 
in his body, the contractions, the alternating motions, 


ae 


SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. 231 


the ‘secretions, the circulations, the pains, the health 
whence it comes, the medicine whither it goes. But 
the soul is a creature infinitely more complex, and 
subtle, and mysterious, and as much less possible to be 
read and comprehended by any but the all-piercing in- 
telligence of God. 

2. It is a matter deserving of our distinct notice, 
that in what is frequently understood by self-examina- 
tion, there is something mistaken or deceitful, which 
needs to be carefully resisted. In the first place, it is 
a kind of artificial state, in which the soul is drawn 
off from its objects, and works, and its calls of love 
and sacrifice, to engage itself in acts of self-inspection. 
Instead of doing all the while, and only, what God 
requires, it suspends, for so long a time, its work, and 
is occupied with a study of its own figure and char- 
acter. The will is called off to be questioned, when 
of course it is out of that engagement where it other- 
wise would be found—even as a workman might 
withdraw himself for a day, or a week, from his work, 
to examine whether he is industrious or not. So one 
falls to examining his affections, when of course his 
mind is introverted, and called off from God and Christ, 
where only right affections have their object and rest. 
And the result not seldom is accordingly, that persons 
who become thoroughly bent down upon this matter of 
examining their affections, are doomed to see them 
wither and even die out in the process. The wonder 
then is, that the more faithful they are—and surely 
they mean to be faithful—the darker they become. 


232 SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. 


They sigh and groan, they try to be yet more faithful 
in their tests, and press the search harder, and yet 
they still lose ground only the more rapidly; till 
finally they begin to imagine that God has utterly 
cast them off, to receive them no more. Whereas the 
fact is simply this, that they have turned away their 
mind from God, and of course do not see him, can not 
find him. Then follows a hard chapter. Where is 
now theirlove? They do not see that they have any. 
How can they love God distinctly, when they are 
wholly taken up with self-inspection? Their mind 
itself is just as much withdrawn from God as it is oc- 
cupied with itself, and will of course have just as 
little outgoing trust and affection, just as little of 
God’s light, as it is required to have, when it is all 
the while poring over itself, and its own dark 
shadow. 

Many years ago, I knew an excellent, much-esteemed 
Christian mother, who had become morbidly intro- 
verted, and could not find her love to God. Seeing 
at once that she was stifling it by her own self-inspect- 
ing engrossment, which would not allow her to so 
much as think of God’s loveliness, I said to her, “ but 
you love your son, you have no doubt of that.” “Of 
course I love him, why should I not? To show her 
then how she was killing her love to God, I said, 
“but take one week now for the trial, and make thor- 
ough examination of your love to your son, and it will 
be strange if, at the end of the week, you do not tell 
me that you have serious doubt of it.” I returned, 


SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. 233 


- at the time, to be dreadfully shocked by my too cruel 
experiment. “No,” she said, “I do not love him, I 
abhor him.” She was fallen off the edge, and her 
selfexamination was become her insanity ! 

And I must not omit to say, that we may even be 
so far engrossed, in this matter of self-examination, as 
to become thoroughly and even morbidly selfish in it ; 
for what can be more selfish than to be always boring 
into one’s self? No matter if it is done under pre- 
text of being faithful to God, still if one wants to be 
faithful only for his own sake, as he certainly will 
when neglecting every thing else to do a work upon 
and for himself, he is as truly selfish as if religion were 
wholly out of the question. And then if he should 
perchance bring himself on through this selfish struggle, 
into the opinion or verdict of approval, which he pos- 
sibly may—for after all most men are likely to make 
out somehow that they are right—then he will only 
have crowned his selfishness, and established the de- 
ceit that he will probably carry with him to his grave. 
No character is more hopeless, as regards the matter 
of review and rectification, than one that has been 
smouldering whole years, in a process of self-devoted, 
self-scrutinizing, introverted life, and has come out in 
the opinion that he is assuredly right. The conclusion 
reached is the more certainly irreversible, in the fact 
that he is wrong; and is reached, not by any act of 
faith, but by a merely human, and for the most part 
selfish process of spiritual incubation, separated from 
God. 

20* 


234 SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. 


3. It is important also, as regards a right impres- ° 
sion of this subject, to observe how much is implied in 
a hearty willingness or desire to have God examine 
us and prove us. If we undertake to examine our- 
selves in our own power, it may be to make outa 
case for ourselves, or, as sometimes happens, in a 
morbid state of depression, to make out a case against 
ourselves. False influences in all complexions black 
and white assail us, and go into the endeavor with us. 
But if we are ready to have God examine us, and 
bring us to an exactly right verdict, that is a state so 
simple, so honest, so impartial, so protected against 
every false influence, that we scarcely need to look 
any further; for it is already clear that we are in a 
right mind, ready to receive the truth, seeking after 
the truth, waiting on God for the discovery, and pre- 
pared to admit his holy will whatever it may be. In- 
deed I might even go so far as to say, that a soul 
breaking forth naturally in the prayer—Examine me, 
O Lord, and prove me, try my reins and my heart, 
need examine or inquire no farther; it is already 
found to be in God’s friendship, and is sealed with the 
witness of his acceptance. 

The only true and safe conception then of the duty 
called self-examination is, not that we are to examine 
ourselves by our own self-inspection merely, but that 
we are to be rather examined and proved by God. 
And this brings me— 

4. To the point that there is a way of coming at the 
verdict of God, whatever it may be. None will doubt 


. SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. 2385 
the superior ability of God to examine our state, and 
_know what .it is, compared with any ability we have 
to investigate ourselves, but they will see no possi- 
bility of making the judgment of God, in our case, 
available. How can we know, they will ask, what the 
verdict of God is respecting us, and if it be true, as it 
must be, how can it be of any benefit to us? Because, 
I answer, God designs to give us, and has planned to 
give us always, the benefit of his own knowledge of 
our state. That we should never be able to make out 
an accurate or reliable judgment of ourselves, by mere 
self-inspection, is taken for granted. God has never 
set us on that footing as regards the conduct of our 
lives. Many or indeed the general mass of mankind 
have only the smallest degree of power, in the way of 
reflective exercise. They are little exercised in this 
way—almost none but philosophers are thus exer- 
cised—their lives flow outward in a way wholly ob- 
jective, just as the springs flow outward from under 
the hills and never go back to retrace their courses 
and inspect their origin. Therefore, God never puts 
us on the work of testing ourselves. He expects to 
do this for us, and if we will take his judgment, al- 
ways to allow us the advantage of it. We are not 
complete beings or beings perfectly equipped for ac- 
tion apart from God. We are complete only in him. 
He is, and is ever to be, our light. We are to know 
ourselves in and through him, just as we are to do our 
will in his will, and have our majesty in his majesty, 
reigning with him in his throne. 


236 SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. 


If then we are in a truly right state towards Him, © 
he will know it, and he has planned to give us witness, — 
infallible and immediate witness of the fact. For as 
unbelief and wrong separate the soul forthwith | 
from God, so where there is no such separation, or | 
where the separating force is abated, God is imme- 
diately revealed in the soul’s consciousness. It 
abideth in the light, it recognizes God as a divine 
other, present within. Even as the Saviour himself — 
declared—“ but ye see me,” and again—“T will mani- — 
fest myself unto him.” God then is manifested al-— 
ways in the consciousness of them that love him, and 
are right towards him. They need not go into any . 
curious self-examination, that will only confuse and 
obscure the witness. They will know God by an im- — 
mediate knowledge or revelation. They will have his 
spirit witnessing with theirs. They will have the tes- 
timony that they please God. In their simple love 
they will know God’s love to them; for he that loveth 
knoweth God. For a man then to be obliged to ex- 
amine himself, and study and cypher over himself to 
find out whether he is a child of God or not, is no 
good sign ; for if he is, he should have a witness more — 
immediate, and should want no such information at 
all. God knows him perfectly, and if God has re- — 
vealed himself in the consciousness, if he has the wit. — 
ness of God and the testimony that he pleases God, — 
what more can he have? and if he has not this at all, © 
what can he have, or what, by self-scrutiny, find to 
make good the want of it? . 


| 


i SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. 237 


But we have a great many defects and errors and 
bad qualities lurking in us, and here again we shall 
_ discover that God has planned to bring us into a per- 
ception of these, and set us in the same judgment of 
them that he has himself. As the fining pot is for 
silver, and the furnace for gold, so the Lord trieth the 
hearts. It is wonderful to see with what skill God 
has adjusted all our experiences, in this mortal life, so 
as to make us sensible of our errors and defects. As 
the invisible ink is brought out in a distinct color, by 
holding what is written to the fire, so God brings out 
all our faults and our sins by the scorches of expe- 
' rience through which we are ever passing in the fiery 
trials of life. If we are proud, he has a way to make 
us see it, and to break down our pride. If we 
cherish any subtle grudge, or animosity, he will some- 
how call it out and make us see it. If we are selfish, 
or covetous, or jealous, or frivolous, or captious, or 
self-indulgent, or sensual, or self-confident, or fanatical, 
or self-righteous, or partial, or obstinate, or prejudiced, 
or uncharitable, or censorious—whatever fault we have 
in us, whether it be in the mind, or the head, or the 
body, or I might almost say the bones, no matter how 
subtle, or how ingeniously covered it may be, he has 
us in the furnace of trial and correction, where he is 
turning us round and round, lifting us in prosperity, 
crushing us in adversity, subduing us with afflictions, 
tempting out our faults and then chastising them, 
humbling us, correcting us, softening, tempering, 
soothing, fortifying, refining, healing, and so man: 


238 SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. 


aging us, as to detect all our drossy and bad qualities, 
and separate them from us. He sits as a refiner and 
purifier of silver, and allows nothing to escape either | 
his discovery or our correction. No self-examination | 
we could make would discover, at all, what he is con- 
tinually bringing to the light, and exposing to our de- 
tection. The very plan of our life is so to handle us 
that we shall come into the full advantage of his 

‘ perfect knowledge of our state and character. He is 
proving us at every turn, making us apprized of our- 
selves, trying even the reins and the heart, that our 
most secret things may be revealed. J 

It can not then be said that there is no way of 
making God’s examination of us available; for he is, 
all the while, and in every possible manner, giving us 
advantage of it. If the trial of our faith is precious, 
he for just that reason leaves it not to us alone to 
make the trial, but his plan is, knowing what we are 
and what we want, to conduct every point of the trial 
himself. 

I will only add, and this perhaps I ought to add, 
that if there be any legitimate place for self-examina- 
tion, it is in the field last mentioned, where we go into 
self-inspection just to discover our faults, and the sins 
that require to be forsaken or put away. This would 
be a very honest kind of endeavor, and I see no 
objection to it, save that it is very likely, when pur- 
sued too closely, to produce a morbid state, and sink 
the soul in the disabilities of fatal discouragement. 
No prudent Christian, therefore, will even dare to set 


SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. 239 


himself down upon the discovery of his sins, and 
make it his chief engagement. He can not be always 
looking down this gulf, and not wither in a prospect 
so ungenial. He must have a little gospel somehow, 
and if he does not have a great deal, so much sin will 
starve him to death. It will generally be much better 
to just let God put him on such ways of discovery 
here, as will be best for him. But this is not what 
most disciples go to self-examination, or by their 
teachers are put on self-examination, for; they are set 
to it, not to find out their faults, and correct them, but 
to settle and try out their Christian evidences. Our 
great and godly Edwards writes his book on the A ffec- 
tions, for exactly this, and taking his book for what he 
verily thought was to be the use of it, I as verily think 
it one of the most mistaken books that a good and 
saintly man was ever allowed to write—it is a kind of 
morbid anatomy for the mind. And we have hun- 
dreds of others in the same strain. Evidences of 
piety are a great deal more likely to be hidden, or 
ruled out in that way, than they are to be found, and 
the most sensitively delicate disciple is the one that 
wili suffer. It is well if he does not push himself into 
spiritual distraction by it. On the other hand, when 
evidences are sought in this manner, that class of 
persons who are commonly finding what they look 
for, will be almost certain to fish up the evidences 
they want. This whole method of self-examination, 
to settle the question of christian evidence, is decep- 
tive, unscriptural, and bitterly injurious. 


C 


240 SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. 


And it is injurious, I must add, not only in mis- 
leading, but also in hindering the disciple. How 
can he get on with any sort of growth, when totally 
occupied in the matter of self-inspection? The very 
engagement becomes a dry and weary fumbling of 
his own state. Even as the lad I knew, who had 
undertaken to grow a patch of watermelons, looked 
to see them ripen long before they were grown; went 
to them every day and examined and tested them, 
pressing his thumb down hard upon them, to see if 
the rind would snap; for that was to be the sign 
when they were ripe. But the poor things, under so 
many indentations, fell to rotting, and did not ripen 
at all. They were examined to death. God’s winds, 
and rains, and suns, and dews, were doing a much 
better examination upon them—with the advantage 
that it gave them time to grow, and a chance to nat- 
urally live. 

The real wisdom of the christian, then, for this is 
the conclusion to which we are brought, is that he 
shall be more natural; not facing round as he walks, 
to examine the tracks he makes, but asking the way 
to Zion with his face thitherward. This dismal re- 
troversion is the bane of character, giving it a twisted 
and hard look, a sorely and even selfishly circum- 
spective look. You see at a glance, how often, that 
the man or woman writes a diary, and puts down all 
the frames passed through, keeping them in tally, and 
considering the figure they make. Not that every 
man who writes a diary does it of course in this self 


SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. 241 


regarding way. George Fox writes two heavy vol- 
umes of diary, and after he has fairly opened his 
christian story, from its birthday beginning, he 
scarcely so much as alludes to any frame of feeling, 
or score of evidence in his life, but simply puts his 
face right onward, telling where he went, and whom 
he saw, and what in God’s name he did. He never 
once intimates a misgiving, and when he comes to 
die, he is so little concerned for it, that in what is 
called his death, he simply forgot to live! Such a 
disciple grows less conscious and not more conscious 
in his habit, and there is such plain, forward-going 
simplicity in him, that he visibly bears the stamp of 
God’s approving, not of his own self-approving. 

God forbid, my hearers, that in ruling out so much 
that has been held in sacred esteem and reverence, 
and carefully observed and practiced by the faithful 
and godly in Christ Jesus, I should seem willing to 
encourage lightness and looseness of life. Is it a light 
thing to be said, or only a true, that a man does not 
want to examine himself to find whether he is cold or 
hungry, whether he loves his child, whether he is an 
honest man? No, the sturdy fact is that all such an- 
swers sought come and ought to come without seeking, 
and can only come of themselves in simply being true. 
And if they do not, if a man has to make a case on 
the question of his honesty, he is very certainly a good 
deal less honest than he should be. No, my friends, 
the thing wanted here, and that which only yields the 
true evidence, is the genuine down-rightness of 

21 


242, SELF-EXAMINATION EXAMINED. 


our life—that it covers no shams, gets up no mock 
virtues and no pretexts of proceeding scientifically, 
but goes right on, putting its face the way it goes, and 
not backwards. It is consciously right, and God is 
consciously yielding it his immediate testimony. And 
let there be no doubt of this, as if it were a way not 
safe. God will make it safe as he only can. And if 
you are afraid that some looseness may creep in, or 
some false hope steal you away, be upon your watch, 
for watching is one thing, and self-examination a very 
different thing. Watch and pray that you may not 
enter into temptation, and let the prayer be this, 
which God will never disregard—“ Search me, O 
God, and know my heart, try me and know my 
thoughts, and see if there be any wicked way in me, 
and lead me in the way everlasting.” Then forward, 
forward in that way. 


‘ EPI. 
HOW TO BE A CHRISTIAN IN TRADE. 


“Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with 
the same, and made them other five talents.”—Waith. 25: 16. 


In these words of parable, the Saviour had proba- 
bly no thought of expressing his formal approbation 
of trade, as a human occupation; but we only see the 
more convincingly, in what he says, that he has not 
even a thought of disapprobation concerning it. His 
man of five talents he lets go and trade with the 
same, and regards it as a legitimate or even com- 
mendable success, that he returns, after a time, with 
his little capital doubled by his profits. Taking, then, 
his words, as a verdict for trade and trade profits, I 
propose a discourse on this particular calling or en- 
gagement, showing—I. The fair possibility of being ; 
and II. How to be, a Christian in trade. 

I undertake the subject, as I ought perhaps to say, 
because of the immense number of persons who are in 
this occupation, and are drawing their livelihood from 
it; and especially because of the great number of 
young men who are just about going into it, or look- 
ing to it with more or less desire, as the probable 
engagement of their lives. That I can raise any im- 

, (243) 


244. HOW TO BE A CHRISTIAN 


pressions, in minds a long time submitted to its 
temptations, which will have the power to mend what 
moral damage and disaster they have suffered, I 
hardly dare to hope. But the very large class of 
young persons just entering, or just about to enter, 
this field—some of them getting under sinister influ- 
ences even beforehand, from the false impressions they 
have taken up—these I do hope to set in juster modes 
of thought, and more christian ways of expectation, 
that will steady their engagement and make it safe. 
Some of them are going into it with a purpose wholly - 
ingenuous, and really meaning to be Christian men, 
if possible, in their now chosen occupation. Others, I 
very well know, are a little poisoned already by cer- 
tain false notions they have taken up, and allowed to 
sharpen their appetite. They do not propose to earn 
their living in it, but they are going into it to get 
their living without labor, out of the profits they make 
by their transactions of buying and selling. And 
this word profits means, they think, no reward of ser- 
vice done to the public, but what they are to get by 
their sharpness. They expect success just as any 
specially sharp tool is visibly expecting to cut. Under 
this profligate and really degraded impression, run-— 
ning, alas! how very low in multitudes of cases, they 
hurry in to make, as they say, their fortune. Trade, 
in their view, is illicit, and they go to it in fact as a 
reputable kind of larceny. They expect sharp practice, 
or to profit by getting unfair advantages. They would 
not say it, and probably they do not know it, but they 


IN TRADE. 245 


nevertheless really expect to thrive by a strictly 
filching operation, which operation they call trade. 

Now these false impressions of trade, by which so 
many young persons going into it are so dismally cor- 
rupted, are gotten up, I grieve to say, largely by the 
sophistries and shallow detractions of christian people, 
who ought to know better. What, they ask, is the 
very operation of merchandising but a drill exercise 
in selfishness? And what is the law of price or profit, 
but the law of possibility; viz., to ask the highest 
price the market will bear, be the cost what it may, or 
the value what it may. What too is current price 
itself, but a market graduation, settled by the con- 
trary bulling and bearing of two selfishnesses, that 
of the sellers and that of the buyers? And then 
what is the trader doing but feeling after, all the 
while, and having it even for his life, to wait on, the 
adjustments of selfishness, even as barometers wait on 
the air-waves, and their fluctuating levels ?—which 
waiting always on the unsteady, unsteadies even the 
sense of principle. Besides the very working of a bar- 
gain—what is it but an adroit wrestling match; a talk- 
ing up of the market and the goods perhaps on one side, 
and a talking down on the other, or a magnifying by 
shrewd silences that is even more cunningly and skill- 
fully insincere? There is besides, how often, what a con- 
trary play and parry of opposing magnetisms; the sell- 
ing airs and plausibilities holding a match with the buy- 
ing airs and plausibilities, and each watching each, even 
as an eagle watches the prey, to find how the game is 

21* 


246 HOW TO BE A CHRISTIAN if 
turning, or what will turn it. How often also is it 
testified, that untruths are a staple matter here, and 
so far necessary that a clerk or apprentice, who is ~ 
known to have let a bargain slip for want of a mere 
lie, will be almost sure to lose his place, as one who 
has proved his incompetency. By so many poisons, 
and chemistries of poison, it is imagined that trade is 
inevitably saturated. Possibly one may be in it, and 
keep the repute of a Christian. But how many nom- 
inally christian merchants will even maintain it as by 
argument, that a Sunday goodness, a churchly feeling, 
or prayer-meeting mood, is about the utmost grace of 
religion permitted them. The man of trade, they will 
say, is aman sandwiched between such mere times of ob- 
servance, and the downright selfishness of his engage- 
ments. How few young men going into trade, under 
such impressions, will expect to make their life a 
properly christian life in it. And of those already in 
it, not one can be a true living disciple, save under a 
wholly different set of impressions. Moved by this 
conviction, I now undertake— 

1. To show that there is no necessary moral detri- 
ment in trade; that there is quite as good a chance 
of christian living in it as in any other kind of en- 
gagement. 

And here I put forward, at the front of all that 
comes after, the very certain fact that there have been 
good christians in trade; and if that be so, then it fol- 
lows by a very short argument, that what has been 
can be—that is, can be again and often. And what 


IN TRADE. 247 


examples of this fact do we meet with in the 
records of christian living; such as the well-known, 
much honored father Markoe, the merchant saint of 
New York; such as our own high-working, nobly 
christian, trading brother, A. M. Collins. Or such 
again as the world-famous British man of God and 
merchant, Samuel Budgett. These I know are super- 
lative examples, and yet we have hundreds in the 
world’s record to match them, and thousands in a 
grade only one degree below, and millions in a really 
honorable grade of worth and christian respect that is 
only a little more common still. There is, in fact, no 
human employment that has yielded better, and pro- 
portionally more numerous examples of christian liv- 
ing than trade. No matter if there be some disad- 
vantages and hindrances to piety in it, the same is 
true of every other kind of business which can be 
named. That most tenderly beautiful saint of God, 
the Quaker Woolman, began with merchandise, and 
being apprehensive lest he might find it “attended 
with much cumber,” drew off to another occupation 
that was like to be more simply industrious in the 
sense of labor, viz., that of a tailor; but he left that 
even more speedily, because the call of God that was 
on him put him in silent affinity with another, which 
I have no doubt was to him more wholesome than 
either of his two former callings, because more con- 
genial to the sacred bent of his nature. Otherwise he 
could have been as good a christian in either as in 
that. 


248 HOW TO BE A CHRISTIAN 


Sometimes it is urged as a proof of the anti-christian 
affinities of trade, that the man who gets deeply en- 
gaged in it becomes eager and sharp, dropping out the 
soft amenities and charities, and carrying his points of 
mercantile justice, with a peremptory squareness and 
mechanical hardness not pleasant to encounter. That 
exactly was the accusation most commonly set against 
two of the distinguished characters just named, Mr. 
Collins and Mr. Budgett. And the reason was wholly 
to their credit. They were never known to veer by a 
hair from integrity in any transaction of business, but 
they would have veered a hundred times a day, falling 
into a muddle where all distinctions of principle are 
lost, if they had not done their trade as trade, under 
the law of trade, and reserved their charities—all 
their sympathies, allowances, mitigations, merciful ac- 
commodations—for a separate chapter of life. But 
here it would come out how surely, that no tenderest, 
most simple-hearted child was more easily moved 
in his compassions, or more unstinted whether in 
gifts or favors. And for just this reason it is, that 
so many of the best and most valuable christian dis- 
ciples we have, are such as come up out of the walks 
of trade.. They do not dawdle in their life-work, but 
they mean business. They know how to engineer 
operations, how to move with alertness, and turn their 
hand nimbly as things require, keeping every thing 
still in the training of order and practical system ; 
playing in, under these, and as it were to fill them out, 
all most practical mercies and tenderest graces. So 


IN TRADE. 249 


that if we want the best engineering of counsel, and 
the most energetic flexibilities of movement, we are 
more likely to get our supply from the class of disci- 
ples in trade, than from any other. Operations are 
their study, and they get limbered in it for all most 
cautiously safe and practically efficient operations, in 
religion. 

The next point to which I ask your attention, is 
that all apprehensions of a specially harmful exposure 
in trade are mistaken. What it calls profits are just 
as truly earnings, as any of the fruits of hand labor. 
For it is a calling grounded in nature, even as mining, 
or agriculture, is conceived to be. Thus one clime 
produces ice, another oranges and figs, another sugar 
and coffee, another cotton, another furs. In like man- 
ner iron, gold, silver, salt, and coal, are distributed 
locally in spots, on different or distant shores. Medi- 
cines are sprinkled here and there, some in one region 
and some in another. And then all these supplies 
and comforts of the different regions must be gathered 
by the merchants, transported to the parts where they 
may be wanted, distributed into small parcels, and 
sold out to customers for use. All which requires a 
great risk of capital, great contriving, long corres- 
pondences, expensive transportations, adding as much 
and real comfort to the uses of life, as if the articles 
were drawn out of the soil by the hand labor of the 
persons engaged. They do, in fact, a work very much 
like that of the rain, or the rain clouds, which instead 
of leaving the world to be watered by waterspouts 


250 HOW TO BE A CHRISTIAN 


falling here or there once in a thousand years, take up 
the water that is wanted in parts remote from the sea, 
carrying it off thither by their wind-sails, and there, 
making small the drops for a gentle and general dis- 
tribution, let it fall on the ground, sprinkling it all 
over. These rain-clouds are the merchants of the sky, 
and trade is distribution in a like beneficent way. 
Trade in things is the kinsman of tradition in facts, as 
any one may see on the faces of the words, and there 
is a commerce of delivery and distribution in both, 
that fulfills a like beneficence. And if any one doubts 
whether the goods distributed can be rightly sold for 
a profit, or at more than their cost, let him go without 
these conveniences of trade and its distributions for a 
few months, let every product stay at home, every box 
and bale unbroken, every piece uncut, and he will 
begin to understand what work trade is doing, how 
real it is, how deserving of profit. 

But granting there may be some service rendered 
by trade, what price shall be fitly paid for it, and to 
what is this matter of price left, but to the rapacity of 
the merchant? Just contrary to that, in the common 
articles of traffic, almost nothing is left to him ; for he 
can not much advance upon the current price, which 
is always determined, so to speak, by the common vote 
of the market. A conspiracy may be gotten up by some 
merchant, to buy the market bare of some necessary 
article, or he may do it as a single operator by him- 
self, but then he ceases from any thing which can be 
properly called trade, and becomes a robber. His 


a 


IN TRADE. 251 


very operation casts off the laws of trade, and prefers 
the chances of plunder. Or, again, it may some- 
times happen that a blight, a frost, a fire, disturbs the 
ratio of supply, and gives opportunity for exactions 
that are cruelly extortious. Doubtless it is sometimes 
possible, in such a case, to carry prices up to the pitch 
of starvation, but the man who does it is sure to dis- 
cover, at last, that he has offended against the laws of 
trade at bitter cost to himself. Who will come to 
him for trade, after he has shown himself a pirate? 
Much wiser, and in how much better keeping with 
the laws and possibilities of trade, was the course of 
that rough lumberman of a large mountain village of 
California, who could say to his townsmen driven out 
by a fire which, in a single hour, had swept every 
thing bare—“here is your material, give me just 
what price I have been receiving, no more, and it is 
yours.” This man, be it noted, was the man, after all, 
who best fulfilled the laws of trade. 

Ordinarily the transactions of merchandise en- 
counter no such temptation. The undertaking is to 
sell under and by the laws of current price; and the 
productions of agriculture, and the wages of hand 
labor, go by exactly the same law. Nor is it any ob- 
jection that current price is being all the while adjust- 
ed, by the contrary pull of two selfishnesses, for it is 
even doubtful whether two benevolences could do it 
any more justly. ‘The seller does not settle the price, 
and the buyer does not settle it. It is finally settled 
in despite of both, and by those higher laws that 


252 HOW TO BE A CHRISTIAN 


make the contrary pull of the parties about as good a 
measure of want and supply as can be contrived, even 
though—perhaps because—it settles the price at just 
that point which is disliked by both. And if men 
were angels, there would really be no likelier and 
juster method than to let supply and demand work at 
the case each on its side, and make the prices vibrate 
by their oscillations, in just this manner. There is 
now and then a case, it is true, where some merchant 
very nearly fixes current price, for the time, under the 
autocratic principle, putting it down thus and thus for 
himself; which is understood to be the manner toa 
principal degree of a certain immense trading-house, 
too vast to have a rival, in the city of New York. 
But even this almost dictator of prices has a very 
close eye to what is possible, and what is not, some- 
times marking up his prices, and sometimes marking 
them down; consenting virtually to the fact, that 
price is not by him, but by what after all is above 
him. 

But what shall we say of trading under variable 
prices, and practicing on the customer accordingly as 
he will bear it. The guage of price is not, in that 
case, in the goods, but only in the unquestioning facility 
of the customer—a way of trade that even proposes 
to fleece all the customers best entitled to favor and 
protection by their generosity, and make up the gen- 
eral score of the profits at their cost. At the same 
time it is a very hard, forbidding way of trade to main- 
tain prices absolutely invariable. It is even doubtful 


i 


IN TRADE. 2538 


whether variation, within a certain small range, may 
not best serve the flexibilities of courtesy, and best 
serve the interest of both seller and buyer. Possibly 
some very great millionaire of trade may set his own 
prices, and mark off his goods to be sold only by the 
mark. But it must be said in justice to the small 
trader, that he very often can not well ascertain what 
the current price really is, and is even obliged to do it 
by feeling of his customer, and giving a certain faith 
to representations brought him thus, of what is going 
on in the street. Perhaps the current price itself has 
veered a little since yesterday. But this is a very dif 


ferent thing from having no price at all, and going for 


such amount of prey as the customer will suffer. 
That is not trade, and there is no bad effect of trade to 
be thought of in it. It is the way of a knave, ora 
jockey, and these are not included under any proper 
definition of trade. 

As little room is there, under any thing properly 


_ called trade, for what many seem to regard as the nec- 


essary skill, in raising color by glosses of false recom- 
mendation, or by small lies sprinkled in for the due 
stimulation of the customer. That is not an accom- 
plishment belonging to the genuine operation of trade, 
but only to the low-lived, inbred habit of the man. 
Such arts I know are practiced, but never to ad- 
vantage. They are sometimes even a fatal hindrance 
to success; for as certainly as what is contemptible 
carries contempt, the man who is willing to sell his 
integrity with his goods, will appear to be just the 
22 


254 HOW TO BE A CHRISTIAN 


character he is. Undeviating adherence to truth and 
justice may possibly lose to-day’s customer, but in the 
long run it will bring as many more as it is more im- 
plicitly trusted. There is, I know, a certain, low- 
minded folk who have a general liking to high talk, 
and can hardly imagine they have made a good bar- 
gain, till they have gotten the price down a great way 
below the talk. And yet most men are wiser, loving 
to buy of one who puts them at their ease, by his 
quiet ways of integrity. They make a study instinct- 
ively of the salesman, and if they find him pressing 
his point by much talk, and that which is manifestly 
reckless, they are taken both by a disgust and a cau- 
tion, and leave him to the knavish airs of his practice. 

Of course it will be understood that no one, caring 
to be a christian in trade, wants to be certified of any 
such possibility in sales and distributions that are 
themselves illicit, or immoral. Moreover trade itself 
is a grand republic of commerce, under laws of use 
and beneficence. These illicit engagements are 
outside of morality, doing no service, satisfying no 
beneficent use—outrages often of liberty, insults to 
purity, instigations of appetite—and of course are 
just as far outside of trade. They are even mockeries 
of it in its prime idea; selling what they call goods, 
which they know to be evils. 

There are then, as we have now discovered, no rea- 
sons why a young man going into trade, may not ex- 
pect to be a christian in it. The contrary impression 
so often held is without any suflicient foundation. 


IN TRADE. 255 


But the possibility does not make sure of the fact, and 
we now pass on— 

II. To show how the trading man may be surely 
christian, and more decidedly and strongly christian 
for his engagement. 

At this point we ascend of course to a higher point, 
above the plane of morality, and begin to look after 
what belongs to the life of religion. No man of 
course expects to be a christian in trade, without 
being a religious man in it. And just here, alas! is 
the difficulty most commonly encountered—the diffi- 
culty, viz., of continuing to be a christian without be- 
ginning to be; the difficulty of being kept safe in re- 
ligion, or religious character, by a business carried on 
without such character, and wholly outside of re- 
ligion. I even suppose it will be objected mentally, 
at least, by some, that after all I only undertake to 
show how aman may be a christian in trade by being 
one. Undoubtedly I do; for it would be a very sin- 
gular thing if I could show how one may be a chris- 
tian in trade, without having it on hand to be, or with- 
out any responsibility accepted for being a christian 
at all. No, the point I undertake to show is how a 
man, who is in the beginning of a christian life, or 
seriously bent on such a beginning, can maintain the 
love of God, and grow up into God, by faith and 
prayer, and go on to make all most solid attainments 
of character, in the life-occupation of trade. And 
then when the question how is raised, the very first, 
always indispensable thing is that he shall be faith- 


256 HOW TO BE A CHRISTIAN 


fully set to it, and expect to succeed only by making 
cost for it—by enduring hardness, by fighting out the 
great human battle with self-seeking and the love of 
money, and by standing fast in God’s name in all 
holiest integrity. He must not go into trade as any 
sharp work, to be sharply, shrewdly done, he must not 
-pitch himself recklessly into making his fortune, he 
must not look upon his business future with a mind 
wholly slack towards God and religion, willing to be 
floated whither the tide wili carry him. No true 
character is ever made in that way, in any employ- 
ment. A going in upon chance, with a slack mind 
submitted to the drift of the occupation, is enough to 
make sure as possible of not being a christian any 
where. And it is precisely in that way that trade has 
come to be regarded as a kind of life so preémi- 
nently hostile to the interests of character. 

It is also another very important consideration that 
you are permitted, if at all, to go into this occupation 
by a really divine call. Not many, I suspect, ever 
think of any such possibility for a merely secular em- 
ployment, or for any but that perhaps of the christian 
ministry. And very few, I fear, thoroughly believe 
in even that; simply because it is held to be a thing 
so entirely special, a call of God that stands by itself, 
with no other to match it, or keep it company. 
Whereas the real and really grand truth is that God 
has a place for every man, in what is to be his par- 
ticular employment, as he has a place for every rock, 
and tree, and river, and star. And exactly this we 


IN TRADE. 257 


assume, perhaps without knowing it, when we speak of 
this or that man’s employment as being this or that 
man’s calling. Weuse the word as in a smothered mean- 
ing, to signify only his engagement or life-occupation ; 
but there lingers in it, we may see, a certain divine re- 
collection, as if he were in it, or it were his privilege to 
be, as by God’s personal and particular call. He may 
not so believe, himself, but just as surely as he is in 
his own right place, he is in that to which he is called, 
whether he has ever thought of it in that way or not. 
Some are not in their place, and it is their sad in- 
felicity that they never can be. But the great major- 
ity of men I do think are led, drawn, beckoned, whis- 
pered into their calling, some pushed in by stern ne- 
cessities, some by urgent wants or incapacities, some 
crowded in by Providential cireumventions. Mean- 
time a blessed few find their places by going to God 
for them. And this most sublime and really glorious 
privilege is for all, and for all kinds of places and em- 
ployments. There is such a thing as spiritual guid- 
ance for men. You can form some judgment of your 
ealling by finding what others think of you; by 
considering also your tastes, and tempers, and capa- 
bilities; what kind of loads you can carry; what kind 
of annoyances you can bear; also by considering what 
opportunities of good are afforded; and where you 
ean make yourself of greatest consequence to man- 
kind, and the salvation given to mankind; but then, 
when all such inquiries are ended, you can be ab- 
solutely sure of your calling, by seeking unto God’s 
22* 


258 HOW TO BE A CHRISTIAN 


oracle for it. Tided inwardly by his divine Spirit, 
as you may be, you will flow in sweetly,as by si- 
lent drift, into the very thing which is to be your 
calling; whether it be trade, manufacture, or any 
other calling. And then having found your oceupa- 
tion, and come into it by the calling of God, what sat- 
isfaction will you have in it! how reverently, lovingly, 
safely, will you invest your life in it! 

Now, again, after being thus installed in trade, as 
by the call of God, how surely may you have God’s 
help in the prosecution of it. How surely, that is, if 
you ask it, and train your ways of practice so that you 
can fitly receive it. Here, too, I shall encounter, as I 
well understand, a certain kind of unbelief that makes 
it extravagant, or even a merely pietistic illusion, to 
be looking for God’s help in such a matter as the car- 
rying on of a trade! As if the Spirit of God, by his 
private concourse, or the Providence of God, by his 
government of the world, could descend to the care of 
the very small, very secular matter of helping a man 
succeed in a concern of traffic! Of course he can not 
and will not, if traffic is the really selfish and low con- 
cern we are all the while assuming it to be. But if it 
be a proper and most real industry, if it undertakes to. 
gain a profit by doing a service, and a profit propor- 
tioned to the service, if it is and is to be a beneficent 
matter, such as any call of God must be; then I see 
not why even God should scorn it, or refuse to be a 
helper in it. He did not scorn to give a special in- 
spiration to Bezaleel the artificer in brass, and Aho 


IN TRADE. 259 


liab the carpenter, filling them “with the Spirit of 
God, in wisdom and in understanding,” to “ devise 
eunning works,” “in all manner of workmanship.” 
God indorsed the patriotic prayers of Nehemiah and 
sent him back with money and much timber to rebuild 
the city. Paul commanded in the shipwreck, by the 
Spirit, even down to the matter of dining before the 
break. If we think that all things secular are too 
common for God’s care, we dishonor both ourselves 
and him. God helps nothing wrong, and omits to 
help nothing right. All right employments are call- 
ings into which he puts his servants for their good, and 
what will he more surely do than help them to find 
their good! The trader is not a man by himself, and 
yet in some sense he is; for his purchases are often 
a very blind problem, his rivals are many and some- 
times bitterly unjust, his risks depend on things ex- 
ceedingly occult, his liabilities of panic when great 
storms of revulsion overturn the confidences of credit, 
are such as not even military commanders often en- 
counter in disastrous campaigns. ‘Customers too are 
how often unreasonable, creditors unjust and rapa- 
cious, the laws a trap, and the courts more careful to 
be ingenious than to be just. In all which, as by 
these mere glances we discover, the merchant, going 
into trade, most truly goes to sea. His calling is 
verily on the deep—unstable, stormy, set about by com- 
binations and complexities that require high courage, 
a firm, steady-judging mind, a perception that is next 
thing to a prophecy of event. Therefore he wants, if 


260 HOW TO BE A CHRISTIAN 


any man does, true God-help always at hand, and 
much of it. He needs, for his mere business’ sake and 
the solid composure of his counsel, a steadfast ground- 
ing in God, and a conscious strengthening with might 
by God’s Spirit in the inner man. Scarcely does even 
an apostle need it more. 

It is another consideration also that reaches far, that 
the merchant in his calling of trade is put in a relation 
to God so inherently religious, if he will undertake it 
in that manner, that he is justified in passing his vow 
not to be in trade, or even for a day to stay in it, if he 
can not have the enjoyment of God in it. This 
is true of all legitimate occupations, and all right 
works of industry, and not less true of trade than of 
any other, that the man who is in it can have and is 
bound to have God with him in it; to begin his day 
with God’s smile, to end it in God’s approbation, and 
to pass it all through in the testimony that he pleases 
God. Going thus into and onward in trade, he will 
have no difficulty in being a christian init. He is 
fast anchored in all right practice and right living, by 
holding himself to courses that permit the enjoyment 
of God, and then the enjoyment of God will in turn 
hold him to his courses. Doubtless a man may be a 
very poor christian, who settles by mere hap-hazard into 
such kind of courses as will fill up his money-making 
days; a great many poor christians are made in that 
way, and a great many more that are no christians at 
all. And so it is in every lawful business the world 
knows. No carpenter, blacksmith, weaver, clothier, 


IN TRADE. 261 


no simplest and purest of all tradesmen, gets on well 
as a christian, who does not set himself to such a kind 
of living that he can have the enjoyment of God in it. 
But having that, how smoothly does he sail out on his 
course, and how sweetly do the gales of the Spirit 
waft him on. Such a man can be a christian any 
where, and will as certainly be, in trade as any where 
else. 

Again there are even special advantages in trade as 
regards the development of a christian life, which do 
not occur as largely in any other employment. The 
transactions are many, crowding thick upon the 
shelves and counters all the day. The temptations of 
course are just as much more numerous as the transac- 
tions; and it must not be forgotten that the more 
tempted a man is, the more opportunities are given 
him to grow. Scarcely could he grow at all if none 
at all were put in his way. Besides, the thicker 
temptations are huddled, the less chance they have to 
prevail; there is no time in fact to do much more 
than to reject them. Whereas if temptations only 
come single, one a day for example, hanging round the 
mind in still approaches of seduction, and holding as 
it were all day their magnifiers up before it, the poor 
disciple’s chances of resistance are how greatly dimin- 
ished. 

There is also a considerable christian advantage in 
the relation that subsists between the merchant and 
his customer. To be a customer signifies more 
or less of favor and confidence. The customer, in 


262 HOW TO BE A CHRISTIAN 


being such, commits himself in a large degree to the 
honor of the merchant, and then the merchant in turn 
accepts him naturally as a man who comes in expres- 
sion of trust, and is fairly entitled to generosity. And 
if the customer is an old customer, coming to his old 
haunt of trade, where the old fair-dealing trader has 
for so many years been proving his integrity, you will 
see that they meet as friends, and not as sharpers com- 
ing to the prey. And if they are christian men, you 
will see that also, even though they do not say a word 
about religion. There is no barrier visibly. between 
them, but a perfectly open confidence, and their 
meeting does them good, as truly as if there 
were some grace of communion in it—as, in fact, 
there is. 

Sometimes again the proposed transaction of trade 
includes a question of credit. And here the merchant 
is put to a trial that always yields him benefit. He is 
getting insight thus into men, and learning whom he 
may safely trust. His whole exercise goes to sharpen 
his perceptions of character. He learns in it also to 
respect modesty and neatness of person, with plain- 
ness of dress. And above all he learns to observe 
who a man’s friends are, as the most significant token 
of all. He gets a way of moral sharpness in this way 
that has an immense value in his understanding even 
of himself. Specie payments and pay-down trade 
would make a very stupid and morally stupefying ele- 
ment in comparison. 

Trade also furnishes occasion: of beneficence to the 


IN TRADE. 263 


poor, which are all the better for both parties, that 
they make no parade of charity, but may pass for a 
buying and selling between them. The merchant, I 
have said, should do his trade by the strict law prin- 
ciples of trade, and never let his operations be mixed 
up with charities. But how many beautiful charities 
may he dispense under the nature of trade, which not 
even the receiver will know, and which he himself 
will enjoy the more, that he has them for his unknown 
secret before God. Thus he parcels off what he may 
consider to be more or less nearly the waste of trade, 
all which he would otherwise put in auction, and sell 
at great loss to himself and great profit to the buyer, 
and marking it down to the very lowest rate he could 
hope to receive—remnants, faded, and smirched, and 
smoked, and shelf-worn goods, and styles of goods 
_ gone by—gives his silent order to sell in that mark, 
to chosen candidates hard-pressed by want, and ready 
because of their want, to find a relief most weleome 
in the opportunity. It is trade on one side, and 
trade on the other ; only that on one side it is so near 
to the confines of beneficence that it consciously passes 
over. A more gentle, genial, and genuine influence 
on the man could hardly be devised. 

It is yet another and very great moral advantage of 
trade, that it is just the calling in which a christian 
man will best learn the uses of money. If he began 
as a christian at the true principle of christian living, 
he put himself in bonds, so to speak, to consecrate all 
his successes to God. And then, from that point on- 


264 HOW TO BE A CHRISTIAN 


ward, he has not been after money for money’s sake, 
but as capital for other kinds of works ; sometimes 
secular and sometimes religious. He handles what 
he gains by trade in turns of nimble investment, and 
never hoards it. The agriculturist and the small ar-. 
tisan handle money slowly in restricted quantities. 
It stays long in their hands before expenditure; they 
look at it often, and begin to think fondly of it. In 
this way they very often become misers. But the 
merchant almost never is a miser; for the money that 
he gains signifies nothing to him, save in the footing 
of his balances. It freely comes and freely goes, and 
he turns it as readily into goods as goods into money. 
Money in fact is to him but one of the kinds of goods ; 
more valuable if at all than any other, because it is 
more easily convertible. And for just this reason it 
is that our freest and largest benefactors in the mat- 
ters of public charity and religion, are commonly men 
who have gotten their success by trade—because their 
notions are not stunted by the small amount of money 
needed in carrying on their transactions, and be- 
cause what they get is expected to go and not to 
stay. 

Hence, I conceive, it is going to be discovered, that 
the great problem we have now on hand, viz., the 
christianizing of the money power of the world, de- 
pends for its principal hope, on the trading class in so- 
ciety. Talent has been christianized already on a 
large scale. The political power of states and kingdoms 
has been long assumed to be, and now at least reall~ 


IN TRADE. 265 


is, as far as it becomes their accepted office to main- 
tain personal security and liberty. Architecture, 
arts, constitutions, schools, and learning, have been 
largely christianized. But the money power, which 
is one of the most operative and grandest of all, is 
only beginning to be; though with promising tokens 
of a finally complete reduction to Christ and the uses 
of his kingdom. In our late civil war, the money 
power, for the first time, so far as I know, since the 
world began, laid itself fairly on the altar, and gave 
itself, in heartily-pledged devotion, to the public wel- 
fare. It even took up, we may say, the nation’s 
heavy and huge bulk, and bore it grandly through on 
its Atlantean shoulders, Every thing we have for 
public love, was the maxim even of money, and there 
was never before a fiscal campaign to match the sub- 
limity and true majesty of the spectacle. It was the 
money power standing sponsor for the nation, in its 
terrible baptism of blood. Now what we wait for, 
and are looking hopefully to see, is a like consecration 
of the vast money power of the world, to the work, 
and cause, and kingdom, of Jesus Christ. For that 
day, when it comes, is the morning, so to speak, of the 
new creation. That tide-wave in the money power 
can as little be resisted, when God brings it on, as 
the tides of the sea; and. like these also it will flow 
across the world ina day. And such a result, I con- 
ceive, we are to look for largely, to the merchant 
class of disciples. Trade expanding into commerce, 
and commerce rising into communion, are to be the 
23 


266 HOW TO BE A CHRISTIAN 


outline of the story. When the merchant seeking 
goodly pearls—all the merchant race, find the pre- 
cious one they seek, and sell their all to buy it, 
they will make it theirs. 


The question I began with—‘ How to be a chris- 
tian in trade?” is, I think, now sufficiently an- 
swered. At the end of this review, I think it will 
he agreed, that there is no calling in which a chris- 
tian may grow faster, and rise higher in all holy 
attainments. After he has once learned how to 
enjoy God in his calling, how to carry Christ di- 
rectly into his works, and do all in the higher con- 
sciousness of Christ revealed, his satisfactions will 
be great, his increase rapid, his strength immoy- 
able, and his very sleep elysian. And what is a 
nobler sight to look upon, than a christian mer- 
chant, standing at. the head of his operations; thriv- 
ing in the small, or rolling up his immense income 
in the large; doing every thing squarely, as in terms 
of business, and not in a fast and loose manner, yet 
with a christian heart as flexible and free, and as 
little hampered by the mechanism of trade, as love 
itself must ever be; then passing out among his 
kind, to look about for objects wanting his aid ; 
standing as a bank of charity for all good neces- 
sities to draw upon; resorted to with confidence by 
all who are forward in good works ; spreading his 
generosity well up toward the limit of his surplus 
means; firm in credit; honored for his word of 


XIV. 


IN AND BY THINGS TEMPORAL ARE GIVEN 
THINGS ETERNAL. 


“While we look, not at the things which are seen, but at the 
things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are tem- 
poral, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”—2 Cor. 4: 18. 


THERE is a great deal said about looking away from 
the things of time, to the things of eternity; and 
Paul, I suppose, is credited with this idea on the score 
of the language here cited. Whether he would ac- 
cept the credit is more doubtful. It certainly is no 
conception of his, that we are to ignore the temporal, 
and go clear of it, in order to being fixed in the eter- 
nal. Indeed this kind of prescription, so constantly 
reiterated, and soaked in, as it were, by a long dull- 
minded usage, is really about the sleepiest and most 
noxious drug that Christian living has ever had put in 
its way. I acknowledge that these temporals are 
often too much like the temporalities of the Pope, 
and keep the eternals a great way off. But if we lay it 
down, that we are to really look away from time, 
when we look at, or in order to look at, eternity, we 
make a very hard case for practice; for what figure is 
any one likely to make in the realizing of things eter- 
nal, when he has even to push the world out of sight, 

(268) 


IN AND BY THINGS TEMPORAL, ETC. 269 


in order to see them. Have we not also a suppressed 
or subtly instinctive sense of something unpractical in 
the attempt ; as if it were a forced view of life, more 
 ascetical than practical. How can we think, in real 
earnest, that such a world as this was made just to be 
looked away from? And if we try to do it, tearing 
our mind away from the visible and the temporal, and 
“requiring it to see only what is invisible and eternal, 
how certainly do we find the air too thin to support 
our flighty endeavor, and drop away shortly on the 
_ ground, held down to it, after all, by temporal weights 

_ and visibilities we can not escape. 

_ And just here I apprehend is the reason in great part 
f of that inability to realize, or give a sound existence 
q to spiritual things of which so many complain—they 

misconceive the problem. It is not to literally look 
_ away from temporal things in order to see the eternal, 

but it is to see the temporal in the eternal, or through 
K it and by means of it. These temporals I conceive 
are the scabbards of the eternal, or the capsules in 
which it grows, or the matches whose fires are kept 
hid in their bodies. Paul I am sure had no other 
conception. By not looking at the temporal things, 
he means simply not fastening our mind to them, or 
upon them, as the end of our pursuit; for he calls 
them “things that are seen,” which implies that, in 
another and more simply natural sense, they are 
looked at ; for how can they be things seen if they 
are not? 


23* 


a 


270 IN AND BY THINGS TEMPORAL 


There is then, I am going now to show, a fixed rela~ 


tion between the temporal and the eternal, such that we shall 
best realize the eternal by rightly using the temporal. We 
shall best conceive the true point here, by observing 
the manner of the apostle himself; for it was one of 
the remarkable things about him as a Christian, that 
he was so completely under the power, so sublimely 
invigorated by the magnitudes of the world to come; 
longing for it, testing himself in it, and carrying the 
sense of it with him, into the hearts of all who heard 
his preaching. Things temporal he saw a great deal 
more penetratingly than any mere worldly mind 
could ; saw far enough into them, to discover their un- 
solidity, and their transitory and ephemeral conse- 
quence, and to apprehend just so much the more dis- 
tinctly, the solid and eternal verities represented by 
them. Things and worlds are passing—shadows all 
that pass away. The durable and strong, the real conti- 
nent, the solid landing-place, is beyond. But the pres- 
ent things are good for the passage, good for signs, good 
as shadows. So he tramps on through them, cheer- 
ing his confidence by them, having them as reminders, 
and renewing, day by day, his outward man by what 
of the more solid and glorious future is so impressively 
represented and captivatingly set forth in them. He 
does not refuse to see with his eyes what God puts 
before his eyes. He has noted the successions, and 
phases, and forms of things. He distinguishes God’s 
stamps and signatures upon them, takes the whole or- 
der and architecture of the creation as a type of God’s 


) 


ARE GIVEN THINGS ETERNAL. 271 


great mind, and rejoices that the invisible things of 
God, even his eternal power and Godhead—all the 
truths eternal—are, from his creation, clearly seen. 
He loves society also; rejoices in its new prospects, 
now tliat the eternal kingdom of the Lord Jesus is set 
up init. And what is more than all,—more than the 
creation, more than society, more than all things tem- 
poral and visible, Christ, the Son of God himself, has 
come out in his eternity, to be incarnate in these 
_ scenes, and live in them and look upon them with his 
human eyes. And so these all are hallowed by the 
enshrining, for a time, of his glorious divinity in them, 
becoming temporalities redolent of his eternity. And 
so, as every thing was raised in quality, even from the 
grave he perfumed by lying in it, up to the stars he 
looked upon, all, all, this wondrous furniture is 
changed and blessed, and hallowed by the life he lived 
here in the flesh. In a world thus glorified, it would 
not have been wonderful if Paul had even been ready, 
looking round upon these ranges of things we call 
idols and hinderances to religion, to say, “let us 
_ make tabernacles and stay.” And yet he did it not. 
If Christ had been here, Christ also had gone; to go 
therefore and be with him was far better. Christ had 
come too, not for society’s sake, not to beautify and 
heal and gild society, or to get up any paradise in 
i these temporalities, but only to bring us on, or rather 
off, and establish us in the grand eternals of his king- 
dom on high. Our apostle looked thus on the things 
that are temporal as not looking on them, but as look- 


272 IN AND BY THINGS TEMPORAL 


ing straight through, on the things eternal, which they 
represent and prepare. He looked on them just as 
one looks on a window-pane, when he studies the 
landscape without. In one view he looks on the glass. 
In another he doesnot. Probably enough he does not 
so much as think of the medium interposed at all. 
Or,a better comparison still is the telescope ; for the 
lenses of glass here interposed, actually enable the 
spectator to see, and yet he does not so much as con- 
sider that he is looking on the lenses, or using them at 
all—he only looks on the stars. So also the apostle 
looks not on the things that are temporal, even while 
admiring the display in them of God’s invisible and 
eternal realities. He looks on them only as seeing 
through; uses them only as a medium of training, 
exercise, access unto God. Their value to him is not 
in what they are, but in what they signify. 

Thus it is a true use, I conceive, of things tem- 
poral, that they are to put us under the constant all- 
dominating impression of things eternal. And we 
are to live in them, as in a transparency, looking 
through, every moment, and in all life’s works and 
ways, acting through, into the grand reality-world of 
the life to come. 

Having gotten our conception thus of the apostle’s 
meaning, as well as a good argument from his re- 
ligious habit and character to prove it, let us next 
consider the fact, that all temporal things and works 
are actually designed or planned for this very object ; 
viz., to conduct us on, or through, into the discovery 


a 


ARE GIVEN THINGS ETERNAL. 278 


of things eternal. Every existing thing or object in 
the created empire of God, all forms, colors, heights, 
weights, magnitudes, forces, come out of God’s mind, 
covered all over with tokens, saturated all through 
- with flavors of his intelligence. They represent God’s 
thought, the invisible things of God; and an angel 
coming out into the world, instead of seeing nothing in 
them but only walls, would see God expressed by them, 
just as we are expressed by our faces and bodies. The 
invisible things of God, all his eternal realities, would be 
clearly seen. No, we do not become worldly by look- 
ing at things temporal, but by not looking at them 
closely enough, and with due religious attention. We 
first make idols of them for their economic uses and 
their market value, and then, having begun our wor- 
ship, we go on with it, having our eyes shut. Why 
should we look in, to see divine things in them, when 
we are already so far captivated by what they are 
worth in possession? How different, for example, 
would they be, if we could but stay upon them long 
enough, and devoutly enough, to see the prodigious 
workings hid in them. We should find them swing- 
ing and careering in geometric figures, weighed and 
spaced in geometric proportions; and what are these 
but thoughts of mind and laws of thought—eternal in 
their very nature? It comes out thus to us, in these 
stellar magnitudes and motions, that they must be 
somehow rolling and wheeling inside of some mind, 
as if they were its proper thinking—which indeed 
they are. Again what do we find as regards material 


274 IN AND BY THINGS TEMPORAL 


substances, save when we are just hoarding them for 
gain, or devouring them for pleasure—auses that ad- 
journ intelligence—but that they are composed of 
atoms joined by count in the exact notations and 
formulas of arithmetic? So that, in our chemistries 
we think out the world—all the orb-matter of the 
sky, all the earths and rocks and cerystallizations. 
The significance, in this manner, of the substances is 
not so much their substance, as the eternal laws we be- 
hold in them. Mind, we see, penetrates them all ; 
they are all bedded in mind. Necessary truth, the 
eternal absolute truth of mind, that which being must 
be forever, fills and orders them all, visibles and tem- 
porals though we call them. 

The same is true of all the multifarious, seemingly 
inexact orders of animated nature. Bone, flesh, cir- 
culation, innerving force, what do they make but a 
composition that appears to almost think aloud. And 
so evident is it, that these classifications of life, ani- 
mal and vegetable, are related to mind, that Mr. 
Agassiz puts them down as premeditations of God, 
eternal orders of the thoughts of God—which, ruling 
creatively in them, make them, in that manner, not 
visibles. only, but intelligibles, possible objects of 
science. 

There is yet another and more popular way, in 
which these temporal and visible things carry forces 
and weights of eternity witl, them—they are related 
as signs or images, to all the most effective and most 
glorious truths of religion. They are all so many 


ARE GIVEN THINGS ETERNAL. 275 


physical word-forms given to make up images and 
vocables for religion; for which reason the Scripture 
is full of them, naming and describing every thing by 
them—by the waters and springs: that quench our 
thirst, by the bread that feeds our bodies, by the grow- 


ing corn in its stages, by the tares that grow with it, 


by the lilies in their clothing, by the hidden gold and 
silver and iron of the mountains, by the sea, the 
storms, the morning mist, the clouds, the sun, the 
starry host, the deep central fires of the ground, and 
the sulphurous smoke they expel—every thing we 
look upon is an image of something otherwise not 
seen, a face that looks out, as it were, from God’s 
eternity, and carries God’s meanings on it. Our com- 


_ plaint therefore that temporal things hide the eternal 


| 
if 


and keep them out of sight, is much as if one should 
complain of telescopes hiding the stars, or window- 
panes shutting out the sun, or even of eyes themselves 
obstructing the sense of things visible. There is a 
way, I know, of handling these temporals coarsely and 


blindly, seeing in them only just what a horse or a 


dog might see. A brutish mind sees only things 
in things, and no meanings. If it were possible for 
us to ignore every thing but what is temporal, we 
could be as perfectly unspiritual as the animals them- 
selves. And a great many minds wholly given to 
things are doing what they can to make this attain- 
ment. But it can not be said, without the greatest 
wrong to God, that he has given us these temporalities 
to live in for any such use. It would even be impos 


276 IN AND BY THINGS TEMPORAL 


sible to make up a world of so many temporal things 
and so many temporal occasions, and keep God’s light 
shining on their faces more visibly, or keep his ever- 
lasting verities more effectively present to every soul. 
Spirituality of habit and thought could not be made 
more possible, or the lack of it more nearly impossible. 
Hence also the fact so often remarked, that forms, 
colors, objects, scenes, have all a power so captivating 
over childish, and indeed over all young minds. Thus 
we note the irresistible impulse of infants to handle 
every thing, which means, in fact, if you study the 
matter a little, that every thing is handling them, 
looking into their hearts, filling them with images 
and shapes, and all the various timber of thought. 
At first they will cry after the moon, or the fire; next 
they will run after the rainbow; and then, as in high 
youth, will see all things dressed in such colors of de- 
light, as to be almost bewildered in their eagerness to 
be everywhere, and seize all things at once. Now we 
are not to think that it is the mere quantities or sub- 
stances of the things, but their senses or significances, 
that take such hold of the soul’s appetite. They cap 
tivate, because they are related all to thought, truth, 
feeling, and offer a drapery to the inborn, scarcely 
waked affinities of the mind ; because, in fact, they are 
the faces and forms of God's thought ; existences 
analogous to whatever is highest and closest to di- 
vinity, in our human mold; poems for the eyes, in’ 
which the subject is God. | 
The child or youth thinks not of it, and yet the 


ARE GIVEN THINGS ETERNAL. 277 


power of the fact is on him. The real and true ac- 
count of the fact is, that the eternals are in the things 
looked on so eagerly by these young eyes, shining out, 
filling them with images, starting their thoughts, 
kindling fires of truth and eternity in their spirit. As 
age advances, the. eagerness of observation slackens, 
but the old man who has lived on many years, won- 
dering all the while where God is, and where the 
eternal things are hid, has all the images in him, so 
that when the Spirit has opened his understanding to 
their significance, it is as if the visible things of God 
had been pouring all their contents into his bosom, 
and he did not know it! O what a glory, what a 
power of eternity is in them now—strange that I | 
should have chased these things so eagerly in my 
childhood, not knowing why; stranger still that I 
should have sought and followed and worshiped them 
so long in my manhood, and valued them only as 
things ! 

Again, it is the continual object and art of all God’s 
management, temporal and spiritual, secular and 
christian, to bring us into positions where we may 
see, or may rather be compelled to see, the eternal 
things of his government. So little reason have we 
to complain, as we do continually, that our relations, 
occupations, and works, take us away from the dis- 
covery of such things, and leave us no time or ca- 
pacity for it. Thus, at our very first breath, we are 
put in what is called the family state. In the provi- 
dence of it we live. By the discipline of it we learn 

24 


278 IN AND BY THINGS TEMPORAL 


what love is, in all the severe, and faithful, and tender)g 
offices of it. And so, as it were from the egg, we are 
configured to the eternal family state for which we 
are made. 

So, also, if we speak, or revelation speaks, of an un- 
seen government or kingdom; where we get the very 
form of the thought from our outward kingdoms 
below. So if we speak of law, punishment, pardon, 
or judgment-seat justification—these all are notions 
prepared in us by the civil state, and by that means 
inserted in our thought, for the higher uses of the 
eternal government in our souls. 

Meantime the ordinance of want and labor, and all 
the industrious works and cares of life—fearful hin- 
derances, we say, to any discovery of God—what are 
they still but works and struggles leading directly in to 
his very seat? What do you do in them, in fact, but just 
go to the earth and the great powers of nature, to invoke 
them by your industry, and by your labor sue out, as it 
were, from them, the supply you want? And when 
you come so very close to God, even to the powers 
and laws which are his reigning, everlasting thoughts, 
what temptation have you to lift your suit just one 
degree,.and make your application even to God Him- 
self! It is the beautiful characteristic of industry 
that, instead of taking us away from God, and things 
eternal, it takes us directly towards him, and puts us 
waiting on the seasons, the soil, the mechanical pow- 
ers, which are but the faithful bosom of God Himself; 
and there we hang, year by year, watching for our 


ARE GIVEN THINGS ETERNAL. 279 


supplies and the nutriment that feeds our bodies. 
Our very industry is a kind of physical prayer, and 
the business itself of our busy life is, to watch the 
gates of blessing he opens upon us. His smile feeds 
us, and his goodness ever before us leads us to re- 
pentance. 

His scheme of Providence also is adjusted so as to 
open windows on us continually, in this earthly house 
of our tabernacle, through which the building of God, 
not made with hands, may be the better discovered. 
God is turning our experience always, in a way to 
give us the more inward senses of things, acting al- 
ways on the principle, that the progress of knowl- 
edge, most generically and comprehensively regarded, 
is but a progress out of the matter-view into the 
mind-view of things; for all the laws, properties, 
classifications of objects, as we just now saw, are 
thoughts of God made visible in them; so that all the 
growth of knowledge is a kind of spiritualizing of the 
world ; that is, a finding of the eternal in the tem- 
poral. For God will not let us get lodged in the tem- 
poral, but is always shoving us on to what is beyond. 
Whoever undertakes to build him a paradise in things 
and stay in them, is either defeated and driven out of 
his project, or is compelled in deep sorrow to find, that 
what he took for pure delight is destitute of all satis- 
faction ; a dry cup, or even a condition of bitter suf 
fering. The fires that fell on Sodom are scarcely a 
more visible sign that Lot’s family are to be dis- 
lodged and flee, than these scorching fires of Provi- 


280 IN AND BY THINGS TEMPORAL 


dence, falling on our temporal state, are that we are 
not to stay here, and shall not? And so God is com- 
manding us off, every hour of our lives, toward things 
eternal, there to find our good, and build our rest. 
Sometimes he does it by taking us out of the world, 
and sometimes by taking the world out of us. Or 
again he sometimes does it by breaking in a way for 
his divine light, through the incrustations we have 
formed about us. Thus, living in the temporals and 
for them, we call them nature, and nature we con- 
ceive to be a wall impervious to God and Spirit, and 
all supernal visitations. And therefore he sends down 
his Son from above, to re-reveal and re-empower the 
eternals we have ceased to see. And it is as if he 
came tearing open the wall, riddling it as it were with 
interstices all through, letting in the love of God, the 
mercy and salvation provided, and calling us to come 
up through into the eternal life. 

Besides, once more, we have eternals garnered up in 
us all, in our very intelligence ; immortal affinities, 
which, if we forget or suppress, are still in us; great 
underlaid convictions also, ready to burst up in us 
and utter even ringing pronouncements; and besides 
there is.an inevitable and sure summons always 
close at hand as we know, and ready for its hour; 
whose office it is to bring the great eternals near and 
keep them in power. True this instituted fact of 
death does not logically prove any thing as regards 
the existence of realities unseen, or of a second 
life. It may be that we drop into nihility. But 


ARE GIVEN THINGS ETERNAL. 281 


we are very little likely to think so, if only we can 
fully admit, what we so perfectly know, that these 
temporal things are only a snow-bank, dissolving 
under us to let us through. No man is likely to miss 
the eternal when once he has let go the temporal. | 
Consent that you are dying, and that time is falling 
away, and your soul will arrive at the conviction of 
God’s eternity, and of things beyond this life, very 
soon. Nay, she will hear voices of eternity crying out 
in her own deep nature, and commanding her on toa 
future more solid and reliable than any mere tem- 
poralities can afford. 


Here then we are, all going on, or in rather, to be 
unsphered here, and reinsphered, if we are ready for 
it, in a promised life more stable and sufficient. The 
eternal has been with us all the way, even when we 
could not find it. Now it is fully discovered, and be- 
come our mansion state. The fugacities are left be- 
hind us. The poets, too, we leave chanting their sad 
refrain, 

“Naught may endure but mutability ;” 
the disappointed and world-weary, sighing over the 
mere shadows which they say were all that was given 
them to possess or pursue; the groping ones praying 
as it were to the darkness, “ O that I knew where I 
might find him,” and complaining if there be a God, 
and things eternal, that they should be so strangely 
hidden by the curtains of sense, so dimly seen, so 
completely shut away by the coarse temporalities of 
24* 


289 IN AND BY THINGS TEMPORAL 


things—all these we leave behind, with only the 
greater pity, that they are so miserably defrauded and 
deplore so bitterly the not seeing, of what they simply 
have no eyes to see. We did see something, and we 
now see more. The eternal things are now most dis- 
tinctly seen, and the temporal scarcely seen at all. 
So that as we now look back on the old physical order, 
it was arranged, we see, to be a kind of transparency, 
and we were set in among and behind its objects and 
affairs, before open windows as it were, there to look 
out on the everlasting and set our life for it. These 
temporal things, we now perceive, were sometimes 
dark to us, just because we insisted on using them as 
they were not made to be used, even as a telescope is 
dark to them who will only look into the side of it. 
How could they be otherwise than dark, when we 
never sought God in them, but only the things them- 
selves. Or if we sought him only a little, with a 
clouded and partly idolatrous love, how could they be 
much less dark? God, as we now see, meant to have 
the eternities stand up round us, even as they do here; 
so visible and tall that mere temporalities should 
dwindle and become shadows in comparison. To the 
truly great and godly soul they always were so, as 
they now are to us. 

Two things now, having reached this point, let me 
ask you to note, or have established. First, that you are 
never to allow yourself in the common way of speak- 
ing, that proposes to look away from the things of 
time, or calls on others to do it. Never speak as if 


ARE GIVEN THINGS ETERNAL. 283 


that were the way of an unworldly christian, for it is 
not. The unworldly christian, if he has the true 
mettle of a great life in him, never looks away from 
the things of time, but looks only the more piercingly 
into them and through. He does not expect to find 
God beyond them, but in them, and by means of them. 
Besides, this call to look away from the things of time, 
good enough as a figure sometimes, has yet a weak 
and sickening sound. It is not a living piety that 
speaks in this manner, but a frothy and debilitated 
sentiment. God help you rather to be manly enough 
to use the world as it is, and get your vision leveled 
for eternal things in it, and by it. You will come up 
unto God by uses of mastery, and not by retreat and 
feeble deprecation. These are they that endure and 
faint not. This world has no power to baftle them, or 
turn them away. They live in it always, having a 
sound respect to it, because they see God in it, and 
love to watch his footsteps. O these grand, un- 
worldly souls, how majestic their aspirations, how 
solid their objects, how firm their sense of God. They 
live in the present as a kind of eternity, never sick of 
it, and never wanting more, but only what, this sig- 
nifies. 

Another correspondent caution, secondly, needs to 
be noted, and especially by those who are not in the 
christian way of life. They inevitably hear a great 
deal said of spiritual-mindedness, and they see not 
any meaning to give it, which does not repel them. 
What are called spiritual things appear to them to be 


284 IN AND BY THINGS TEMPORAL, ETC. 


only a kind of illusion, a fog of mystic meditation, or 
mystic expectation, which the fonder, less perceptive 
believers press out thin, because they have not strength 
enough to body their life in things more solid and 
rational. Living therefore in this spiritually minded 
way appears to be living in phantasm, or breathing 
only hydrogen, or some kind of fetid air, which can 
not sustain a properly vigorous life. There could not 
be an impression farther from the truth. Fer the 
spiritually minded person spiritualizes temporal things 
and the temporal life, by nothing but by just seeing 
them in their most philosophic sense. He takes hold 
of the laws, finds his way into the inmost thoughts, 
follows after the spirit-force everywhere entempled, 
and puts the creation moving, at every turn, in the 
supreme order of Mind. If this be illusion, God give 
us more of it. The spiritual habit is, in this view, 
reason, health, and everlasting robustness. f 


X V. 


GOD ORGANIZING IN THE CHURCH HIS ETER 
NAL SOCIETY. 


“Buttye are come unto Mount Zion, and unto the city of the living 
God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of 
angels, to the general assembly and church of the first-born, which 
are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits 
of just men made perfect.”—Heb. 12: 22, 3. 


Wuewn we read this passage of Scripture, we seem 
to scarcely know what world it is in or about, and not 
much better what world we are in ourselves. “ But 
ye are come,” says the apostle,—are come, in the pres- 
ent tense—that is, come already. And yet a great 
part of the terms that follow,—city of the living 
God,—heavenly Jerusalem,—innumerable company of 
angels,—general assembly and church of the first-born 
whose names are written in heaven,—appear to be 
upper-world terms, proper only to the kingdom of 
God above. Which blending, again, of celestial scene- 
ries, in terms of the present tense, with sceneries part- 
ly terrestrial, is permitted the apostle, it may be, on the 
ground of a large analogy and comprehensive unity, 
including both spheres of life together. All the mgre 
competent and commensurate is the grasp of idea in 
the specification given; all the more fit, too, we shall 

(285) 


986 GOD ORGANIZING IN THE CHURCH by 


see, is the double compass of the language, to the pur- 
pose I have now in hand; viz., to magnify the church 
of God, and freshen up, if possible, some due con- 
ception of its universality and of our responsibility 
for it. f 

It is one of the remarkable, and, it seems to me, 
gloomy signs of our time, that we are so evidently 
losing interest in the church and respect for it. It is 
not a thing so very new, that a great many persons 
outside of the church take up a prejudice against it, 
and begin to prophecy, with airs of exultation, its 
shortly going by, to be among the things that were; 
but it isa matter of far more appalling significance 
that so many of its own members appear to be some- 
how losing out even their confidence init. They do 
not really care much for it, and for this reason prob- 
ably, appeals of duty made for-it get as little fixed hold 
of impression, or practical conviction, as in such a case 
they must. Even if they pray for it, and occasionally 
speak in a way to magnify the duties we owe it, there 
is yet a certain slackness in their manner, which indi- 
cates rather a wish to have some concern for it, than 
areal concern. I sometimes hear the question raised 
by such, what, after all, is the use of the church? 
Would it not be just as well if it were given up, or 
disbanded? Is it not in fact gone by already ? 

No, it is not, I am sure,—and never can be. Do 
we not know that Christ gave himself for it, that he 
purchased it with his own blood, and set it on a rock, 
and declared that not even the gates of hell should 


ee 


HIS ETERNAL SOCIETY. 287 


prevail against it? Is it then going down just now? 
Is it coming to be an outgrown fact? Not unless Jesus 
Christ is outgrown and his kingdom antiquated, which 
I do not think will very soon appear. Until then, be 
the look just now as it may,—until then, the church 
will stay, and we may as well be sure of it. Besides, 
I think we shail finally discover, after we have fairly 
worn out our extempore and shallow strictures, that 
there is interest and meaning enough in it, to make it 
the grand, everlasting fact of the creation of God—all 
which I now proceed to show. 

The church is bottomed, for its final end or cause, 
in society. Man, as we are all the while saying in the 
tritest manner possible, is a social being; only we con- 
ceive but very partially and dimly what we are to 
mean by it. We ought to mean, as regarding both 
him and all other like moral natures in other like 
worlds, that they are items only or atoms—incomplete 
beings, and scarcely more than candidates for being— 
till they become organically set and morally joined in 
society. Existing simply as units, in their natural 
individualities, they are not of much consequence 
either to themselves or to each other. In that kind of 
merely sole existence they have nothing to raise the 
pitch of their consciousness, no moral dues of brother- 
hood or sentiments of justice and charity, no religious 
affinities that put them reaching after God and things 
above the world, and no high sense of being approved 
' by God and other kindred beings. They make, in 
short, no part of a divine whole or society, sweetened 


288 GOD ORGANIZING IN THE CHURCH 


by the possession they take of it, and in being taken 
possession of by it. As being merely creatures made, 
they are scarcely better than nobodies waiting to get 
some consequence, when society arrives at them, and 
they at society. Calling them men, they are not so 
much whole natures related to society outside, but 
they own, as we may say, scarcely a one-tenth part 
of their personality, and society the other nine-tenths. 
Or if we conceive that they oWn their complete whole 
constitutionally, that whole, existing chiefly for society, 
is chiefly owned by society. They are made for soci- 
ety as a moral affair, and have their property in it as 
being owned by it, and morally configured to it. In 
their natural instincts and family affections and such 
like fellow-fondnesses, they begin a faint preluding of 
society on the footing of mere nature; but this is only 
the sign, so to speak, or type, of that vaster, nobler 
society, which is to be fulfilled, under and through the 
great love-principle that claims their moral and socially 
religious nature. In this love principle they are 
kindled as by a kind of infinite aspiration, wanting 
in fact the whole universe—all there is in it, or can 
be, of righteous mind—each to possess it, and in the 
possession be himself complete. And it would even 
pain them to know that there is or can be any living 
nature which they can not touch, or be touched by, any 
society that must be unrelated to them, in any out- 
most world, or kingdom of God, known or unknown. 
The principles that are to organize the society are of 
course identical in all worlds, and the love by which 


HIS ETERNAL SOCIETY. 289 


it is organized is an all-worlds’ love. Hence, the soci- 
ety organized must be an all-worlds’ society. 

Inasmuch now as the great society is to be, and to 
have any real significance can only be, a moral affair, 
it will be seen at once that it could not be organized 
by mere natural constitution. The animals could have 
a certain rudimental show of society prepared in their 
natural instincts. But when we speak of moral soci- 
ety as appointed for men, the most that could be done 
for its organization was to make them capable of it— 
capable that is of acting themselves into it, in all the 
qualities, and tempers, and divine principles, that com- 
pose it. They must be capable, that is, of law, truth, 
love, and sacrifice; and then the whole body of the 
society will be fitly joined together and compacted by 
that which every joint supplieth. Creation first, then 
society—this much we say preparatory to any right 
and living conception of the church, such as we are 
now after. 

And here we strike into the text we began with, 
proposing henceforward to keep the vein of it. It is, 
we have noted already, a kind of both-worlds’ Scrip- 
ture, bearing, as it were, a church celestial and a 
church terrestrial on the face of its terms. And the 
distinction of the two is, that heaven, the upper-world 
church, is Soctery OreanizEp; and the church below, 
Socrerry Orcanizinc—both in fact one, as regards 
their final end or object, and the properties and prin- 
ciples in which they are consummated. Of course 
the incomplete society below comprehends aberrations, 

25 


290 GOD ORGANIZING IN THE CHURCH 


misconjunctions, half-conjunctions, and a great many 
mere scaffoldings which the other does not. Let us 
look now at the two in their order. 


I. The Society Organized. It is called a city, the 
city of the living God; because it is the most con- 
densed, completest form of society. It also includes 
or takes in “angels an innumerable company,” some 
of them, we are to believe, from worlds more ancient 
than ours and from empires afar off, quite unknown to 
us. It gathers in also “ the first-born” of the church, 
and puts their names in register on the roll of the grand 
all-worlds’ society. And “the spirits of just men 
made perfect,” are either there or on the way up, to 
be joined in the general city life and order, for which 
they are now made ready. All the indications are 
that a complete organization is so far made, and all its 
distributions and relations adjusted; as when men of 
all grades and races are gathered into and unified in, 
the state of city organization. 

In this organized society it is one of the first points 
to be noted that there is no distribution by sect or 
sectarian names. Not even the peoples of different 
worlds, and of old-time, gone-by creations come in as 
sub-societies, under names to be maintained against 
other names, though it will not be strange if matters so 
grandly historical are somehow kept in memory, as by 
calling these Uranians, these Saturnians, these Orion- 
ites, these the Earth-born people ; for in being so repre- 
sented, they are not antagonized, but are only made to 


HIS ETERNAL SOCIETY. 291 


show the variety of their populations. Meantime the 
myriads that arrive, new-comers from the church be- 
low, drop off the names of their sects, having left them 
in their graves not raised—for there is no resurrection 
promised of these names. They are not Romish any 
more, not Anglican, not Calvinistic, not Arminian, or 
Wesleyan, their general assembly is not the Presbyte- 
rian, their crowns are not brimmed as being Friends, 
and since baptism is no more wanted, there are 
no Baptists. But they are all earth’s people and 
Christian to a man, all other names being sunk and 
forgot in their now complete society. 

Again, the organization is not bodied under official 
magistracies. There are no pontiffs, patriarchs, or 
prelates; no bishops, priests, deacons. Probably it was 
so bodied, in what was called the church order below, 
and the magistracies too were in a large variety. But 
the organization was never in any respect from them, 
but from God and the headship of his Son; in being 
joined to whom—every man by his faith—the whole 
body was fitly joined together and became the fullness 
of him that filleth all in all. Still the magistracies 
had their day and their uses, not equally well appoint- 
ed, perhaps, but sufficiently authorized in all cases 
when doing a good work. They were not mere straws 
on the flood, and yet the flood has moved directly on, 
leaving them we know not where. In the completed 
society they are all gone by and forgot, and not 
even ministers, in the cleric sense, any longer re- 
main—only all are made priests unto God in their 


292 GOD ORGANIZING IN THE cuuRcH 


ransomed state of exaltation, and all do service work, 
as ministers for the common good of all. I do not by 
this intend to say that there are no precedences in 
stature, and personal weight, and consequent dignity 
and power. They move in great quaternions doubt- 
less, and holy satrapies—thrones, dominions, principal- 
ities, powers—but we are only to see, in this, that they 
are all regnant alike in their order, which is what 
these figures signify. Some of them are as much 
above all priestly and pontifical orders, and carry a 
sway as much more advanced, as they are more tran- 
scendently advanced in thought, and weight, and char- 
acter. And yet they fall into their places, unenvied, 
undecried, there to be admired and loved, and had in 
reverence gladly, because they are wanted for the per- 
fect society by the humbler natures themselves. In 
one view these more advanced ones are lifted into vir- 
tual leadership, because they have such weight of 
being and true counsel as makes them leaders gladly 
accepted. 

It is another point to be observed, that there is no 
theologic base in the society thus organized. Because 
the new faith now is alive all through in the society 
finished ;. which is itself a confession unwritten, only 
more full and perfect than there could be in any most 


rugged articulations of doctrine. They require of — 


course to be fastened by no bonds of catechism or 
creed, in order to keep their liberty safe; for being the 
truth themselves they can bear to be free. Some of 
us here below are much concerned for these matters, 


HIS ETERNAL SOCIETY. 293 


much concerned for theology; and perhaps with rea- 
son, considering how much of trammel is wanted to 
keep organization safe among creatures that are un- 
safe. But there is no such concern above. Theology 
is there even quite gone by, and nothing but truth 
remains. And there is more truth alive in a single 
one of the now free saints, than there ever was in all 
the fathers, and councils, and schools of the world. 
These are grown up now into Christ the head, from 
whom the whole body is fitly joined together. 

But these are negatives mainly. Passing over then 
to what is more positive, we begin to look after the 
crystallizing power in which the grand celestial so- 
ciety is organized. And— 

First of all and at the base of all we find the 
righteousness and love of God. The righteousness of 
God is God in everlasting, absolute right, and all 
created beings who are with him in it, standing fast in 
sinless integrity, will be organized by it, as their com- 
mon inspiration. For not even they will be self 
righteous in their integrity, but will have the right- 
eousness of God by faith upon them—an everlasting 
inbreathing, or influx, an eternal radiation from the 
central sun—and be organized by it, as the common 
bliss of their conduct and character. But as far as 
the great all-worlds’ society is made up of spirits that 
were fallen, these could not be organized till the right. 
eousness gone by is somehow restored, and become a 
new inspiration. And here comes in the love of God 
as the quickening grace of the cross, for it is at once 

25% 


994 GOD ORGANIZING IN THE CHURCH 


the wonder of God’s love, and the organizing power 
of it, that he loves against all unloveliness, loves what 
offends him, what disgusts his feeling, the wrong, the 
cruel, the abhorrent, descending to any bitterest sacri- 
fice that he may gather even such into his family and 
friendship. Could he only love the lovable it would 
not signify much; and not any more, as respects or- 
ganization, if we should do the same. The society 
organized would only be a society of mutual admira- 
tion—a picture gallery in perfect good taste and no- 
thing more. No, there is a grandly tragic side of 
God’s glory which is not here. That can only be 
seen when his love takes hold of the bad, the wrong, 
the shameful, and defiled, able to suffer cost and be 
redeeming love. Only blood can show these tragic 
depths in God. Of course we can not congratulate 
ourselves that we have sinned, but if there be vast 
orders of being, as many think, who have not, one can 
not but regret the very little knowledge they must 
have of what is in the love of God. All that is deep- 
est, grandest in God’s character must be to them, so 
far, a hidden book. And if they have not learned 
themselves to love, and suffer cost for the bad, even 
their noble integrity will leave them something to 
regret, though perhaps they will make up in chastity 
what they lack in experience, and obtain also by their 
questions what they have not learned by defilement 
and sorrow. 

Again the great all-worlds’ society is still farther 
advanced in organization by worship. It coalesces in 


HIS ETERNAL SOCIETY. 295 


worship ; and worship, as it is the grandest felicity, so 
it is the most effective spell of organization. Of 
course we do not take the impression that singing 
hymns about the throne of God and the Lamb, is the 
total occupation of the everlasting society. We only 
take such representations of concord in song as figures 
that completely express the glorious harmonies of feel- 
ing, and the common felicities and homages by which 
it is swayed. Worship is the highest joy of mind, 
because it is the looking up to behold and feel what is 
highest and most adorably great. Thus we take long 
journeys, to just behold and feel what of physical 
grandeur there may be in a cataract; which feeling of 
physical grandeur is a kind of natural worship, a 
feebly effective symbol of what takes place in the 
worship of the adoring, all-worlds’ society. And 
in that common joy of worship—oftener silent prob- 
ably than expressed—they are forever coalescent in 
closer and more powerful bonds, because they feel 
themselves together everlastingly in it. 

Again they have also common works, no doubt, in 
which they are yet more practically organized, even 
as a team is brought into line by the stress of a com- 
mon draught. What their works are we do not know, 
save as we catch brief glimpses here and there; some- 
times sent forth as for guard and watch, also as cou- 
riers, also as convoys home of spirits departed, also to 
be escort trains for the Almighty—chariots of God 
counting twenty thousand, even thousands of angels. 
One of them, great Michael, is sent forth to head a 


296 GOD ORGANIZING IN THE CHURCH 


war against the dragon-power of persecution, though 
exactly what that means we may not know. Perhaps 
they go forth on excursions among distant worlds and 
peoples, reporting, for new study, what of God may be 
discovered among them. Doubtless they have all 
enough to do forever, and that which is good enough ~ 
and high enough for their powers. 

They are united and consolidated also in the society 
life by their victories; for whether they have van- — 
quished all sin, or all temptation, or great forces of 
hate and cruelty banded against them, they come in 
all as victors bearing palms, to be organized by the 
common all-hail, and the te dewm that celebrates their 
story. Indeed they come in like an army in register, 
“the church of the first-born whose names are writ- 
ten in heaven ;” and no organization is so completely 
made up as one that shows a complete register. As 
God’s register also is true, there are no hangers on, no 
pretenders, or doubtful members. Their enrollment is 
by inside knowledge, and allows them to know even as 
they are known. 

And now it only remains to note, in this connection, — 
the very remarkable fact, coincident with what I said 
at the beginning, that when the Revelator John shows 
the grand society emerging full organized, in his last 
two chapters, you hardly know what world it is in, 
whether in the upper descending upon this, or this 
borne upward to the other. No matter; enough that 
now the eternal city-life is come, a state of exact so- 
ciety, represented by the figure of an exactly cubal 


__ 


HIS ETERNAL SOCIETY. 297 


city, as many hundreds of miles high as it is broad and 
long. An image that is hard and violent, and yet on 
the second view, wondrously significant ; as if society, 
that loosely-shapen factor of the creation, were be- 
come the perfect cube of order, in exactest and most 
solid measurement. 

Thus we sketch, as in stammering words, our con- 
ception of the church above, the society organized ; 
and from this we descend to a relative conception— 


II. Of the church below, the Society Organizing. 
It is, in fact, the same as the other, and is pouring on 
its trains continually to be merged in that other, and 
become a part of it. It is even called a family—* of 
whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named.” 
Just as we sing in our sublimest of all hymns— 

One family we dwell in him, 
One church above, beneath, 


Though now divided by the stream, 
The narrow stream of death. 


One army of the living God, 
To his command we bow, 

Part of the host have crossed the flood, 
And part are crossing now. 

The supposition here is, that in what we call the 
church on earth, the peoples composing it are being 
organized in, or into, the state of everlasting society 
just now described. 

And here the first thing we have to settle is, that 
the church is not properly what we recognize under 
this and that formula, meeting in this and that place, 


" 
298 GOD ORGANIZING IN THE CHURCH | 


presided over, taught, confessed, or kept in discipline, : 
by one or another kind of church magistracy. The — 
church, as we are now speaking, is what is called 
“‘the communion of saints,” and the saints themselves, 
in their union to Christ, are the staple matter of it—all 
in training here for the complete society. I am not 
questioning, observe, the right of their covenants and 
cures, and forms, and ministries, or even of their par- 
ishes and bishoprics and councils. I only say that 
these are at best only scaffoldings all, and that the real 
import of what they are, and what they are for, is in 
the souls who are training under their husbandry. 
And they undoubtedly have great uses often in this 
way. As to there being intendancies divinely author- 
ized and the only ones to be allowed, composing, as it 
were, the whole church institute in their own official 
right and sanction—of all this I know nothing. I 
suppose that it would be competent for any brother- 
hood, meeting in the Spirit, if not already organized, 
to organize in what form, under what offices and rules 
they please, and that in this manner any known 
form of organization is allowable, even that of the 
Quakers ; if only they can find how to grow in it, and — 
make an ever-spreading society in the communion of — 
saints. These regimental machineries are none of 
them the church, they are only the scaffolding of the 
church, and are all alike to be done away, when that 
which is perfect is come. 

Furthermore it is difficult to admit that what are 
called sects have no positive use, in the organizing 


4 
Weg 


if 


b 


HIS ETERNAL SOCIETY. 299 


way. If they are divisions and not distributions, 
they are so far evil. But if they are only distribu- 
tions, they furnish by their mutual reactions the condi- 
tions of close thought and compact feeling. Frictions 
too, it may be, are necessary to much life in souls 
partly benumbed by sin. And besides it is a fact not 
often observed, that these distributions, under different 
names, do really help out the enlargement of our 
charity. If we stood related only as individuals to 
individuals, our charities could run out but a little 
way—just as far as our acquaintance runs, and no 


 farther—but when we push out our charities, as in this 


day we are learning to do, on so many sects, we make 
a sweep for them as large as the sects are——counting 
them all in to be the body of Christ, the fullness of 
him that filleth all in all. 

But the power that works towards organization— 
let us inquire after this. The lowest form of it will 
be seen in tle expense, and labor, and wear of contriy- 
ing we submit to, in the way of providing preachers 
and church edifices. For our whole strain of endeay- 
ors in this lowest key,—in which we make ourselves- 
responsible with others for the provisioning and per- 
petuating of the gospel institution,—has a steadily con- 
densing efficacy of organization in it. 

Then again, to go farther inward, our relations of 
church brotherhood are a continual drill in and for 
society. In this we are schooled in fact, into the very 
love of God; for the whole body of our fraternity is 
tinged with badness, troubled by disorder, damaged 


— 


800 GOD ORGANIZING IN THE CHURCH 


by sore faults, hurt by offenses. Envy looks up with 
bitterness, pride looks down with contempt, jealousy 
looks every way snufling the scent of wrongs that are 
only to be. Some are covetous, some are mean, some 
are passionate, some are sensual, some are strong only 
in hate, some are weak only in principle. <A great 
many things are coming out thus, every hour, that are 
very unlovely, and quite likely some of us lose our 
patience at times, and begin to protest that the church 
after all is made up of such kind of material as looks 
really worse than the world. But we come back 
shortly to the living love of God, and take a new lesson ; 
where it is opened to us that we ourselves are in this 
divine society just because it is God’s hospital, where 
he is watching and nursing his poor morally broken 
children, loving them never at all for what they are, 
but only for what he can make them. And so we 
learn to love with patience, and to bear even as God 
does, loving what we do not like, and can not approve, 
and can only hope to benefit. The whole problem of 
our church-life is a problem of divine society working 
towards completion. 

Then again we have the bad, outside, to work for ; 
and here we are drawn to the closest sympathy inside, 
that we may find how to gain, by our love, those whom 
Christ’s love died to save. And this brings us ever 
into the closest sympathy with Christ, so that our 
hearts are melted often, even as his was, by our com- | 
passions for his rejectors. Coming into this labor, as 
we ought always to be in it, we are in the closest, ten — 


: 


| 
{ 


HIS ETERNAL SOCIETY. 301 


derest way of society. We are even configured to 
each other as we look in each other’s faces, and behold 
the glow there kindled. Our assemblies are all con- 
tempered by the heat of God’s living sacrifice for the 
transgressors. Are we not so getting ready fast for 
the perfect society ? 

I say nothing here of our common repentances, and 
common sorrows, when we find that we have fallen 
away from our calling. We confess how much of the 
bad together, and our sorrowing clears up, in new discov- 
eries of what God has undertaken to endure by his love. 
So the ebb of our tide brings on a flood once more. 

And then again, perhaps, we have our times of in- 
spiration. And they are all the more significant that 
we have them in society, and have our hearts burning 
in the same divine fire. We sit in heavenly places 
now, and have the heavenly good by anticipation. 
Our testimonies are bright, our songs make melody in 
our hearts. Brothers, is it not good to be here! 

The common hope we have in our brotherhood, is 
also a great consociating and consolidating power. 
Thus in hope, as our apostle says, we are come before- 


_hand to the city of God, the heavenly Jerusalem. 
_ What we so much hope, he imagines to be already 
_ taken possession of, even as it has taken possession of 
us. And then what possesses us together, fills our 
_ eye, kindles our expectation, draws us towards or into 
_acloser band of society. Even as we sometime see, 
_ when our birds of passage, hastening on to the lands 


where they summer, hook themselves to each other, as 
26 


302 GOD ORGANIZING IN THE CHURCH . 


they fly, in lines of order, pulsing on the air in a com 
mon time-beat of their wings. They fly as if drawn 

by the hope of a city, or populous new nesting-ground 

unvisited by enemies. Trail on thus, ye citizens to-be 

of a city that hath foundations, knowing that your 

blessed conjunctions in hope will there be issued in 

society, everlasting and complete. 

But we do not finish our conception of this all- 
worlds’ society, without naming two points that were 
not, and could not be, named before; because we did 
not know the “ society organized” sharply enough to 
see the necessity for them. But we discover it now in 
the society organizing ; for these two things, we see, are 
even made a part of our training, and go in, as restric- 
tions on organization, to save us from being totally 
gulfed by it. First we must have times of solitude and 
spaces of withdrawment ; and secondly we must have 
the liberty of our own-thoughts; to keep them back, 
or give them out, or give them by selection. There 
must even be room left for opinion. To be always out 
in publicity, to be on parade, so to speak, everlasting- 
ly, to have joys ventilated always by expression— 
the same expression, or the same roundelay of praise— 
would drug our sensibility, and become wearisome be- 
yond endurance. We are trained for no such thing. 
Such perpetual out-door life, such living in transpar- 
ency, would even be intolerable. The grand organiza- 
tion therefore will be perfect, only and because it is 
shortened back by fit limitations ; allowing all the in- 
numerable personalities to have their own field te 


HIS ETERNAL SOCIETY. 303 


themselves, enjoying themselves the more that they 
have ways of withdrawment, and enjoying each other 
the more, that they have such confidence in all as to 
know, that never, in their most secret moments, will 
they even think any thing, having full power to do it, 
which is not sweet, and friendly, and right. Which 
confidence they can have, because their own thoughts 
have no war, run to no bitterness, flowing as it were 


in the rhythm of a perpetual hymn. 


Haying outlined, in this manner, the society organ- 
ized, and the society organizing—the church above and 
the church below—it remains to distinctly state some 
of the points of benefit I have been having in view; 
which I shall do in the most nearly staccato manner 
possible. 

1. Let no one disrespect the church because there is 
evil and sometimes real baseness in it. That is exact- 
ly what there should be, and in that works the brave 
purpose God has in it. What is it but a mill that 
runs for the grinding out of evil? What enters here, 
enters for love to work in, and to work upon—such 
love as can have patience and forbear, and new-con- 
form in good. Doubtless God is proposing, in this, a 
glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any 
such thing; but when it comes to that, it will not be 
here and is not meant tobe. It will be graduated and 
brought home. And what is there in all this, but the 
grandest possible title to respect ? | 

2. It is neither wise, nor right, to be fastidious here. 


804 GOD ORGANIZING IN THE CHURCH 


You do not like churches, you say; they are not the 
sort of people here that suit you best, and you do not 
like to be brothered by all kinds of good folk that 
happen to be disagreeable—as a great many of them 
are. And what if God, and Christ, should have hap- 
pened to be fastidious, unable to love, and seek, and 
bear the unworthy—how would it be even now with 
you? Besides, what kind of world or society ‘are you 
going to hereafter? Is it anywhere provided, in the 
good society of God’s kingdom, that there shall be no 
little ones, no humble-minded, no sweet, low children 
of sorrow? Deo you not see, in the very idea of the 
church, that your fastidious feeling is the very lowest 
and most cruelly bad of all feeling? What, on the 
other hand, can be more honorable to God, than that 
he is fashioning a great all-worlds’ society, that shall set 
the weak in due honor, and repay the dejections of an 
adverse lot by deserved and really great exaltations. 

3. It is every good man’s duty to acknowledge the 
church, and be a hearty, faithful member in it. No, 
you say, it may be; for what we call churches haye 
magistracies, articles, laws of discipline and a sectarian 
life. Yes, and since the society organizing is for the 
partly bad, and not for the just made perfect, how 
could it be otherwise? Not that these church forms 
and magistracies are themselves organization, as we 
often hear. The President of the United States and 
all his subordinates, down to the tide-waiters, do not 
organize the nation. Not even the laws organize it. 
It is done, or can be completely, only when the people 


HIS ETERNAL SOCIETY. 305 


are right, and true, and just, and good, and that with- 
out any laws. Meantime the magistracies and laws 
are only hampers, added to substitute organization, 
where there is none. Have you then no duties to the 
state or nation? So it is your duty to be openly joined 
to the church of God under some frame of order and 
rule. These frames are only shells in which the egg 
is kept. Say not that you belong to the church uni- 
versal, counting that to be enough. Enough, that is, to 
be an ege without a shell! You are going to get 
ready, you imagine, for the perfect society out of all 
society, making common cause with nobody! That is, 
you are going forward into the everlasting society, 
there to meet no solitary creature with whom you 
stood shoulder to shoulder in love and sacrifice. For- 
give me if I greatly mistrust whether you will meet 
any one there that knows you at all—save as a con- 
temner of the society from its beginning onward. 

4. It ought, by this time, to be clear, my brethren, 
that there is no other cause, compact, institution, now 
on foot in the world, which is at all comparable for 
benefit, and dignity, with the church of God. It has 
outlived the great empires, three or four tiers of them 
in succession. It has created new empires, such as 
this of ours. It has leavened all human society with 
elements of advancement—by which educations, laws, 
liberties, sciences, inventions, constitutions, have been 
coming all the whiie into flower. It would take 
whole hours just to give the shining roll of names that, 
in worth and genius, and true sainthood, have been 

26* 


3806 GOD ORGANIZING IN THE CHURCH 


marching out into their great history in it, for thed 
almost nineteen hundred years. The history, I grant, 
is in some sense an awful history, having, as it were, 
Jacob and Esau struggling in it for the birth. The 
woes are sharp, the fires are hot, the prisons are burst- 
ing with wail; women-martyrs, child-martyrs, the gen- 
eral bleeding host of persecuted merit move on, as it 
were, in procession to die. From age to age it has 
been rock, as the Saviour promised, to the wrath surg- 
ing heavily against it; rock, also, which is yet more 
strange, to the horrible rage of cruelty and crime 
within. Unable to be shaken by either this or that, 
it still stands firm as no political state or kingdom 
could have stood, even for a generation; till now we 
see it emerging, as we think, in the grace alone of the 
cross; in that to be full-organized—society complete— 
everlasting, universal, inviolable brotherhood. 

Do we then some of us ask what cause, engagement, 
work is for us? to what we shall best give our talents, 
our inspirable youth, our courage, our powers of de- 
votement and fires of sacrifice ?* To what surely sooner 
than to the church of God? If we have talents to 
spend, where else can we spend them in a braver, more 
unselfish devotion? And if our talents are only mode- 
rate in their measures, how shall we more certainly 
enlarge them than to put them at work in God’s meas- 
ures,—in his subjects, his charities, his contemplations 
and causes—putting our whole nature at school by his! 
Besides, the church is everlasting, the only fabric, 


wath a yu Ce 


: 
: 
" 
f 


HIS ETERNAL SOCIETY. 307 


structure, institute, society or state that is. And O, 
how grand a thing it is that, going in hither, we can 
build ourselves into the eternal. Against all else a 
statute runs of limitation. Getting wealth we get no 
charter for breathing. Getting fame we shall not be 
on hand to hear the ring of it. Going into the heal- 
ing of bodies we can only patch them up for an hour. 
Going into the law we give ourselves to what was 
made last year, and will be unmade the next. Public 
honors vanish, and statesmanship and states are only 
for a time, and commonly a very short time. Not so 
the church of God, the great, everlasting all-worlds’ 
society ; that remains, and if we put much cost and 
sacrifice into it, all the better. Many I know are 
chaffy enough just now in their conceit to prophesy 
the date of it. Do they not tell us it is close at hand ? 
Yes, and they shall see the end of it just when the blue 
fades out of the sky, when the mountains drink up the 
sea, when the heat of the sun freezes in, or better still 
when God’s predestinating will breaks down—then, 
and not till then. No, it. exists for God’s whole 
future and as long as that will last. God help us all 
to have our future in it—every man established, by the 
law of social right, in that universal ownership con- 
ferred on each, by the everlasting society of all. 


b's ve 
ROUTINE OBSERVANCE INDISPENSABLE. 


“Give us this day our daily bread.”—Waith. 6: 11. 


We have two opposite varieties in religion that are 
about equally mistaken; one that puts every thing in 
rounds of observance, as in fasting on Fridays, and re- 
peating paternosters so many times a day; and the 
other in having no times at all, only doing acts of 
duty and devotion as and when we are inclined to it. 
This latter misconception belongs more especially to 
us of the Protestant family ; though to us not equally, 
but in different degrees. We all appear to be in- 
dulging ways of relaxation which we call our advance 
in liberty. And the more impatient of routine we 
become, the higher conceptions we think we are hold- 
ing of the Christian life. Falling away from all fixed 
‘times and rounds of observance, and learning to hold 
them.in a certain disrespect, we go more clear, per- 
haps, than we mean to be, of the sturdy old habit of 
Puritan law, and drop into a looser way that is more 
agreeable. And have we not reasons to offer, that in- 
dicate advances made in religious dignity? Are we 
not casting off our unnecessary bondages? And what 
kind of meaning, or sincerity can there be in ob- 

(308) | 


ROUTINE OBSERVANCE, ETC. 309 


servances or acts that we do not feel inclined to? 
What moreover is prayer but a merely cringing way 
in us and a real mockery to God, when we are moved 
to it by no disposition to pray, but are rather strongly 
disinclined to it, and set ourselves to the observance 
only because the prescribed time has come? Family 
prayer, as a daily observance, fares in the same way. 
No matter what the ground of disinclination may be 
—circumstance, convenience, pressing engagements— 
why make an unalterably fixed ordinance of it, even 
for the children’s sake, when, at any rate, God will 
bring up his sun, and load the morning table with 
food, and set his flowers blooming at the door—all 
punctual and true to their times? Soin matters of 
charity, so in church-going, so in the stated times of 
conference and prayer; and then why not so in the 
going to school of the children, and their punctual 
times of returning, in their street hours for the even- 
ing, and their late hours running into even the far oft 
times of the night. 

What I now undertake therefore is to show the ne- 
cessity, in religion, of a more or less rigidly appointed 
routine practice ; beginning at the petition cited from 
the prayer which our Lord gave his disciples—“ give 
us this day our daily bread.” We do not really un- 
derstand him, unless we distinguish a mental reference 
in his words, to the customary observance of morning 
prayer. For it is a prayer for each morning that he 
gives; a daily prayer for daily bread, even for this 
day’s bread. To offer this prayer, therefore, as many 


310 ROUTINE OBSERVANCE 


do, after the day or every repast of the day is fin- 
ished, is to make it a thing for the form, when it is 
nothing in the fact; which is about the worst dis- 
honor that could any way be done it. The sup- 
position is that the soul is to have every morning, as a 
sunrise of religion—punctual and bright as the morn- 
ing. Conceiving a prayer to be used for the noon or 
the evening—even as the Psalmist says, “evening 
and morning and noon will I pray,” he would cer- 
tainly have done what the Psalmist did, adapted his 
prayer to its time. At any rate nothing was farther 
plainly from his thought, than to say, “pray when 
you have a mind to it, and let it pass when you have 
not.” Whether he means his prayer to be used every 
morning or not, he does, at least, give honor and sanc- 
tion to the daily observance of morning prayer. And 
it is under his sanction, thus given, that I draw out 
now, for your consideration, this great law of practical 
christian living— 

That we need to keep fixed times, or appointed rounds of 
observance, as truly as to be in holy impulse ; to have pre- 
scribed periods in duty as truly as to have a spirit of duty ; 
to be in the drill of observance, as well as in the liberty of 
faith. 

In other words, I am to show the place of what we 
sometimes call routine in religion, and as we are con- 
stituted, the profound necessity for it. And by way 
of preparing you to a just impression of the subject, I 
ask you— 

1. To notice the very obvious fact that the argu- 


_. INDISPENSABLE. 811 


ment commonly stated, as against the obligation of 
fixed times and ways of observance in religion, con- 
tains a fatal oversight. It is very true that mere 
rounds of observance, however faithfully kept, have 
in themselves no value, nothing of the substance of 
piety; but they have an immense value, when kept 
and meant to be, as the means of piety. It is equally 
true that nothing is acceptable to God, which is not 
an offering of the heart. But it does not follow, by 
any means, that we are therefore to wait, doing noth- 
ing till the inclinations or impulses of the heart are 
ready. Thus, when the disciple says, “ Why should I 
attempt to pray? what is my prayer but mockery, 
when I go to it by fixed times without or against in- 
clination ?”—he overlooks entirely what belongs to the 
very economy of prayer, and constitutes its highest 
practical value; viz., that not being an exercise to 
merely play out impulse and inclination, it is also an 
exercise to kindle impulse and beget inclination. 
This, in fact, is the very particular blessing of it, that 
when we are averted from it and slacked in all our in- 
clinations towards it, we may still get our fire kindled 
by it. When we go to it, therefore, by fixed times of 
observance, we do just what is necessary to beget 
fixed inclinations, and train the soul into a habit of 
abiding impulse. Otherwise, or desisting because we 
have no inclination, we consent to have no inclination, 
but that which wavers fitfully, and probably, at last, 
no inclination at all. The whole argument turns here 
just as it does in other matters. There is no genuine 


312 ROUTINE OBSERVANCE 


prayer, for example, that is not offered in the Spirit, 
and yet God promises the Holy Spirit to them that 
ask him. Shall we then decline to ask because we 


" 


have not the Spirit already, and because such kind of — 


asking will be only mockery! No! for the very de- 
sign of God is to meet us im the asking, and to enter 
his Spirit into the asking itself. He puts us to the 
asking for the purpose of getting us open to the Spirit, 
and accessible to his holy inspirations. We go to ob- 
tain inspirations, inclinations, gales of impulse, and 
not simply to play out such as we have already. 
Nothing in this view is weaker, more unpractical, 
closer to a shallow dissipation, more certain to end in 
a dreadful collapse in character, than this most treach- 
erous doctrine, which makes it even a law, that we 
surrender every thing to our inclinations. Let me 
ask your attention now— 

2. To the grand analogies of time and routine 
movement in the world you live in. Nature is, on 
one hand, a world of routine or of prescribed times 
and recurrences, and on the other a realm of versatile 
changes and endlessly varied occasions or appearances. 
The days and years, the moon and tides, the mornings 
and evenings, the eclipses and even wandering comets, 
have their times exactly set, and their rounds exactly 
measured. We can even make up their almanac for the 
most distant ages and cycles. What we call the al- 
manac is, in fact, an exhibition to the eye, of the grand 
principle of routine in nature. So far the vast empire 
of being is grounded in a sublime principle of routine 


INDISPENSABLE. 313 


everywhere manifest ; it is ordained for signs, and for 
seasons, and for days and years. And without this, 
or apart from this, it would be only a medley of con- 
fusion, a chaos of interminable disorder. What could 
we do in a world where there are no appointed times, 
no calculable recurrences, no grand punctualities, 
where the seasons are moved in different orders of suc- 
cessions, days and nights coming at random, and stay- 
ing for such time as they please, the heavenly bodies a 
chapter of celestial accidents in their motions, the 
moon quartering once a month, or ten times a month, 
the tides rising with or without the moon, the dews 
falling on the snows, and the snows on the verdure of 
June—such a world would really be valueless; we 
could do nothing with it, and simply because it has no 
fixed times. And for just this reason God has con- 
sented to inaugurate the sublime routine necessary to 
its uses, determining the times before appointed, and 
the bounds of our habitation. 

And so very close does God come to us in this mat- 
ter of times or of natural routine, that our heart beats 
punctually in it, our breath heaves in it like the panting 
tides of the ocean, and the body itself, and with it also 
the mind, yes even the mind, is a day’s man only in 


its power, a creature of waking and sleeping, of alter- 


nating consciousness and unconsciousness, like the 
solar day and night of the world. 

And yet some can not think it a matter sufficiently 
dignified to -have any prescribed times in religion. 
Though God himself is a being of routine, though the 

27 


314 ROUTINE OBSERVANCE 


everlasting worlds are bedded in routine, though their 
very bodies and minds are timed in it, like a watch, 
or the earth’s revolution, still they are jealous of any 
such thing in religion, and refuse it, as an infringe- 
ment on their liberty! Is this, I ask, the lesson which 
they draw from the great teacher in whose bosom they 
live? And if the world itself, apart from its fixed 
rounds, or prescribed times, were only an uninhabit- 
able chaos, what greater value is there like to be, in 
their own acts and doings, when there is no fixed time 
for doing any thing. 

3. I refer you again to the analogy of your own 
courses in other things, and also to the general analo- 
gies of business. As we are by nature diurnal crea. 
tures in the matter of waking and sleep, so we are 
voluntarily creatures of routine and of fixed hours in 
the matter of food. In this respect the wild Indians 
of the forest differ, we are told, from us—eating im- 
mensely when it is convenient, or the necessary game 
is taken, and then fasting even to the door of starva- 
tion, till the fortune of the hunt brings another 
supply. We, on the other hand, have our appointed 
times—just so many times of repast each day, at an 
exact hour by the clock—and we take it as a hardship, 
or a constraint on our liberty, if we are obliged, by 
any circumstance or pressure, to fail of our time. 
Which then do we suppose to be in the best conditions 
of .comfort, dignity, and good keeping, the savage 
tribes that have no times, or we that feed in the exact 
routine of the civilized table? How is it also in the 


© ee ee 


INDISPENSABLE. 815 


matter of business, or the transactions of trade and in- 
dustry? What figure of success will any man make 
in business, who has no fixed hours; who goes to his 
work, or sends out his men, at any and all hours of 
the day—five o’clock, or ten, or two, as best suits his 
convenience, and despises the oppressive and slavish 
law of prescribed times—as if a man who respects 
himself could submit to be wheeled on through his 
works by the tick of the watch, or to keep time with 
the shadows of the sun! Or suppose he is equally 
averse to the bondage of times in his engagements, 
gathering his dues when they chance to come, ex- 
pecting his interest money at just such times as he 
pleases, and paying his notes when it is convenient— 
will such a man succeed, or will he find that in re. 
fusing any law in times he refuses all success, all 
credit, name and character. If then there is nothing 
men do with effect in the world of business, despising 
the law of times, how does it happen that they can 
expect, with any better reason, to succeed in the mat- 
ter of their religion—their graces, charities, and 
prayers? Wherein does it appear to be absurd, to 
assume that the soul wants times of feeding as regu- 
lar, and frequent, and punctual, as the body? Again, 

4, Consider the reason of the Sabbath, where it is 
assumed that men are creatures, religiously speaking, 
of routine, wanting it as much as they do principles, 
fixed times as much as liberty. Indeed a very con- 
siderable part of the value of the Sabbath consists in 
the drill of its times; that it comes when we do not 


316 ROUTINE OBSERVANCE 


ask for it, commands us to stop when we desire to ga 
on, calls us off to worship by a summons astronomic- 
ally timed, and measured by- the revolutions of the 
world. In this view it is, I conceive, that the fourth 
commandment is set in the decalogue. The design is 
to place order in the same rank with principle, and 
give it honor in all coming ages, as a necessary ele- 
ment of religion, or the religious life and character. 
And what we discover in the reason of the Sabbath 
holds equally well of other observances and duties. 
As we are creatures of impulse, inspiration, liberty, 
so also we are creatures of drill, and there was no way 
to perfect or establish us in any thing, unless we could 
be required to do what we are not inclined to do; to 
appoint our times of prayer, keep ourselves in rounds 
of observance, and hold fast in the punctual discipline 
of times. 

Indeed we could not have any fixed appointment of 
public worship, or common prayer at all, under the 
mischievous doctrine I am contending against. There 
is no true worship, I agree, in public more than any 
where else, unless the heart is in it. Why then 
should we give attendance, you may ask, in public 
worship, when we have no heart in it? Why keep 
one day in seven, if we have no inclination for it? 
And so common worship goes down, the prayer meet- 
ing falls out of possibility, and all the powerful means 
of piety thus ordered are even lost to the world. 

5. The Scriptures recognize the value of prescribed 
times and a fixed routine of duty, in other ways more 


INDISPENSABLE. 317 


numerous than can be well recounted. Thus in the 
old religion, the sacrifices, the great feasts or festivals, 
all the observances and forms had a fixed rotation, 
and the power of a military drill on the mind of the 
people. The entire calendar, in fact, was set off in 
sevens of days, and years, and the sacred number 
seven was carried so far that even the march about Jer- 
icho was to be in it, in order to the mystic sevenfolding 
under God that winds up the spell of its fall. The holy 
men had all their times; one was accustomed to ob- 
serve the sacred number in his worship, having it seven 
times a day, as the fixed order of his life. Another 
went to prayer three times a day. In the New Testa- 
ment the observance of fixed times appears: less dis- 
tinctly ; and partly because many of the zealots and 
precisionists made a righteousness of their observ- 
ances, apart from any meaning or honest purpose in 
them. Wherefore Paul was obliged even to rebuke 
this kind of superstition—“ the observing days, and 
months, and times, and years,” the respecting “ holy 
days, new moons, and Sabbaths.” To break up this 
subjection to ordinances, the new religion even went 
so far as to abolish the seventh day. Not however 
because the routine was itself evil; for the first day 
was, at the same time, substituted as a time of stated 
worship. The object was to strip away the bondage 
that had come to be an oppression, because it was a 
superstition—in that view a beggarly element. And 
that only this was the object is made clear, in the fact 
that Christ himself, in the interval between his resur- 
27* 


318 ROUTINE OBSERVANCE 


rection and ascension, keeps day with his disciples, — 


meeting them by a weekly manifestation of his pres- 
ence, as if purposely to give them stated times—even 
as he had taught them in his first sermon to have 
each day their time of prayer, saying, “ Give us this 
day our daily bread.” All the teachers after him 
made it a point, in the same manner, to institute a 
piety whose rule is order, and whose liberty itself is 
regularity. Thus John is in the Spirit, and meets the 
vision even of his prophecy on the Lord’s day. Paul 
observes that day, and gives it as a good rule to lay 
by what may go for charity on that day, that so there 
may be order in charity ; remembering, also, in the 
very chapter that forbids the observance of holy days, 
new moons, and Sabbaths, to commend the brethren, 
“as joying and beholding their order, and the stead- 
fastness [or regular working] of their faith.” Had 
they no fixed times and rounds of duty, doing every 
thing by impulse or fancy or caprice, he would have 
found any thing but order to rejoice in. Which— 
Again brings me to say that if we have no times in 
religion but such as we take by mere impulse, or in- 
clination, we shall fall away, at last, from all times 
and all duties. Let any one take the ground, for ex- 
ample, that he will never pray except when he is 
drawn to it, and he will less and less frequently be 
drawn. If any one tells me that he can not pray, 
when he is disinclined, or not moved to it, and would 
feel it even to be an act of insincerity, I understand 
that he prays very seldom, and perhaps never. Such 


—_——— 


INDISPENSABLE. 319 


a rule of prayer would gradually let down the best 
Christian, and finally take him quite away from the 
exercise. In his ordinary state he may have been 
commonly inclined to the exercise. But there will 
be times when he is not, and then, if instead of gird- 
ing himself to what interest he may find, he yields to 
his mere self-indulgence, that self-indulgence will rot 
away his confidence, exterminate his peace, turn itself 
into habitual disinclination, and so, by a fixed law, 
put an end to his praying altogether. Doubtless he 
will have a great many plausible reasons to comfort 
him, as he goes down the descent, but the descent he 
will make. Though he is now sure he practices no in- 
sincerity, and does not force himself in that which 
ought to be free, he will also be as clear, that he has 
not the nearness to God he once had, and is losing the 
relish of God’s friendship, by which he once was 
drawn so fondly to the exercise. 

After all, however plausibly we may reason about 
forced exercises, or a want of sincerity in them, we 
have really never any great sincerity where we do not 
sometimes cross our inclinations, by the salutary com- 
pulsion of prescribed times and duties. A scholar is 
not in the true idea of scholarship, till he becomes 
able to bury himself in study for the pure love of 
knowledge. But no scholar ever comes to that, who 
does not put on the harness of work, and set himself 
to the drill of regularity, and the fixed routine of the 
class or the school. A merchant is never deep enough 
in his engagement to have any title to success, or 


320 ROUTINE OBSERVANCE 


chance of it, who does not set his times and proceed 
by system, and when he feels a little disinclination, © 
does not use compulsion enough to hold himself to 
his engagements. And if he has not manliness 
enough or energy enough in him to do this, we take it | 
for granted that there is no earnestness in his engage- — 
ment, and never can be any real success. In fact, no © 
man ever does any thing which he has no times for © 
doing. And if a man is too delicate to suffer any — 
fixed times in religion, it will fare with him as it does 
with other men, who are always about to do some 
great thing, but. never find the time for executing 
their romantic intentions. 

Once more the true way to come into liberty and 
keep ourselves in it, is to have our prescribed rules, 
‘ and in some respects, at least, a fixed routine of 
duties. Ido not say or suppose that a mere round of 
repetitions can accomplish any thing, or that any 
mere observance of times and years can, of itself, pro- 
duce in a soul the grace of a true discipleship. Noth- 
ing done as a matter of mere observance is better 
than the fasting Pharisaically twice in a week, which 
Christ condemned. But if any Pharisee had taken it 
upon him to fast twice in a week, not for the merit of 
the fasting, but to have it as a means and exercise of 
repentance, looking unto God, in the engagement, for 
grace to make it effectual in the renovation of his life, 
no matter how distant he may have been at the be- 
ginning, from the state of faith and liberty, he would 
assuredly have found a living grace of piety in it. 


INDISPENSABLE. 321 


Many a child brought up to begin and close each day 
with prayer, is guided by that simple routine exercise, 
connected with the other influences of life, into the 
true spirit of a disciple, and grows up in the kingdom 
as one imperceptibly initiated. Let any most dull and 
worldly-minded christian gather himself up to the 
established rule of prayer for three times, twice, or 
even once a day, determined not to have it as a mere 
observance, but as an exercise of grace and practical 
waiting on God, and it will not be long before he is 
truly restored and walks in liberty. So that if we 
grant the inherent defect of any and all prayers in 
which there is nothing better than a forced exercise, 
no impulse, no liberty, the true way to be in liberty 
and be kept habitually there, is to live in that holy 
routine which is the bond of all true application, and 
the certain method of all earnestness and fidelity. And 
accordingly it will be found, as a matter of fact, that 
they who are readiest to endure hardness, and have least 
delicacy about forcing themselves in constrained ex- 
ercises, have really most liberty, live closest to God, 
enjoy most of his smile, and as they keep up the 
rounds of duty most faithfully, will have really least 
feeling of constraint, or even think of it as no con- 
straint at all. 

I need not undertake to show you how exactly what 


_ lam here saying is borne out by the experiences of 


holy men. I will simply note one or two examples. 
Thus when you find young Taylor recording it as his 
tule, “the last thing before retiring every night, to 


oe ROUTINE OBSERVANCE 


commit to memory a portion of scripture, and re 
joicing in the computation of what this may amount 
to in eight years,” the time of his preparation, now 
begun, for the ministry, you will discover that spirit 
of application that augurs infallible success. And 
this is not the man to wear out his life in a drill of 
legalities, but he will be one of the freest, most joyful 
and jubilant of the saints. So also when you find a 
Jonathan Edwards, at the age of twenty, recording it 
as one of his fixed resolutions—* Resolved to ask my- 
self at the end of every day, week, month and year, 
wherein I could possibly, in any respect, have done 
better,” you may see a great mind engineering in the 
solemn routine of appointed times and fixed methods, 
to keep himself in the way of fidelity; so to be a liv- 
ing and free soul in the faith, and fill up his life with 
holy impulse, and cover it with the radiance of God’s 
free manifestation. Few men have enjoyed more of 
God on earth, or been less drudged by the punctuality 
and system in which he so cautiously lived. There is, 
I know, such a thing as a legal, barren, painful ob” 
servance, which like the sorrow of the world worketh 
death, just as there are martinets in place of com- 
manders, and regiments in drill that will be cowards 
in the fight, but of this we may be sure, there never 
was or will be a successful man in any thing, least of 
all in religion, who can not gird himself to applica: 
tion by some fixed rules and times of action. 


T regard this subject, my brethren, as one that has a 


ee 


INDISPENSABLE. 323 


most intimate and vital connection with all sound ad- 
vance or possibility of advance in your Christian life. 
Most true it is that God has no pleasure in any mere 
formalities or observances you can offer him. He de- 
mands the heart, he looks with respect and favor on 
no tribute which is not the tribute of the heart’s free- 
dom—unless it be that he lovingly draws nigh to 
them that are pining and sighing for the want of such 
a gift. It is no tread-mill service of routine that wins 
you his friendship. Inspiration, impulse, liberty, a 
service of freedom and gladness, this only is his de 
light. But in order to this, there must also be sub- 
jection to his rule, a systematic care, a prescribed 
obedience of duty, a holy drill of times patiently ac- 
cepted. The way to find liberty is to come into the 
schooling of order and law, and let our will be har- 
nessed in a punctual keeping of holy times. 

Have you never observed that where there is no 
order, there is no piety; or if any, none but such as 
represents the confusion, the irresponsibility, the loose- 
ness and chaotic chance-work of the life ? 

You have noticed with wonder and sorrow, it may be, 
the fact that so many Christians have no reliable exact- 
ness in their dealings with their fellow-men. It is partly 
because they have no exactness with God. They are 
loose in their representations, grazing close upon the 
gates of falsehood, and sometimes hard against them. 
They are not reliable. They are as loose in their 
times and engagements as in their statements. Their 
honor is not maintained. And the reason is that they 


324 | ROUTINE OBSERVANCE 


are loose with God. They do not keep their vows. 
They have no times of prayer. They let their life 
float on as it may, or as self-indulgence or convenience 
will determine. There is, in fact, a very close sym- 
pathy between punctuality in routine, and exactness 
in principle, such that no man will ever be a man of 
principle who has no times. And then again there is 
a sympathy equally close, between high principle and 
God, for it is only a very exact conscience that is 
capable of a sharp confidence, and then it is only a 
delicately sharp confidence towards God that can have 
a clear and glorious access to his presence and his 
smile. 

If a Christian shuns routine, therefore, having no 
times of prayer, observing with his brethren no ap- 
pointments of prayer, praying in his family only now 
and then, or perhaps never, because he may not al- 
ways be inclined to it, you can easily see why he will 
get on poorly in his piety, and why his light will be 
darkness. Because his conscience will be loose, and 
his confidence low, and his will in no keeping, and as 
no pains are taken for Christ, no sacrifices made, no 
fidelity observed, he will of course be as ignorant of 
liberty as he is ambiguous in duty. 

Brethren, how is it with you in this matter? Do 
you live in the girdle of law or without? Do you 
give your charities when some fit of the impulse takes 
you, or when some hard importunity presses you, or 
do you try to settle carefully before God your meas- 
ures, and times, and objects? Do you have your 


INDISPENSABLE. 325 


times of prayer, and keep them, cost what it may, or 
do you pray by the rule of inclination or conve 
nience? Do you keep time with your brethren, in 
their weekly hour of prayer, or do you fall in late, 
or fall utterly away—excusing yourself from attend- 
‘ance because the place is dull, making it more dull 
by a lack of attendance? Do you lag and grow slack 
everywhere, and contrive to think you are waiting for 
God to give you appetite ?—such waiting will be long 
before it wins. If the sun waited below the horizon 
for fair weather, fair weather would certainly wait for 
the sun. Ah, it is a greater thing than you imagine 
to stand fast in your order, and the system of a faith- 
ful life. Half the benefit you get in holy times, and 
punctualities, lies in the fact that for Christ’s sake 
you keep them. You can not be too rigid in this 
matter. A loose way makes a loose man. Prove 
your fidelity by your painstaking, and it will be 
strange if you do not stand fast even though you 
stand alone—blessed and great honor this, to stand 
alone! Such aman has no dull time any where, his 
inspiration is full, his confidence sure, his peace the 
calm deep flow of a river. 

I knew a man of fortune, whose business was a 
care equal to a small kingdom, and who had it as 
the rule of his life, to be always up in the morning 
before the day, or by the early dawn, and to spend 
one or two hours in the exclusive exercises of re- 
ligion—reading, meditation, and prayer. The result 
was that what was begun as a law, became, in a 

28 


326 ROUTINE OBSERVANCE 


short time, his privilege. He had such enjoyment, 
such delight in the unmolested good of the time, 
that it became the chief blessing of his day; and 
all its works were done under the sacred impulse, 
and the smoothed flow and buoyant spring of the 
sense of God there received. It was in fact his 
luxury; just that luxury which every humblest, poor- 
est saint could have as well as he; and in which 
all the gifts and orders of life are how nearly equal- 
ized. 

Now there may be some of you that have never had 
so much as a question about these routine observances 
in duty. What is there for you in them, when, as re- 
spects the matter of religion, you have never come 
into that kind of duty at all? What can you do in 
religion, having no heart to it, but wait till the heart 
is given? What are your sacrifices, till then, but an 
abomination? Of course your prayers or sacrifices 
are an abomination, when they are offered in a wicked 
and abominable spirit. But not so if they are offered 
in a real desire to get help in clearing the bad spirit, 
and beginning a right life. Considering then calmly 
the fact, that religion is the first errand of existence, 
and the chief import of your life-charge itself, give 
yourself to it in set times of thought and spiritual en- 
deavor. No matter what your present feeling may 
be, or how great your want of feeling; no matter 
how indifferent you may be, or how dark as regards 
all christian subjects. Set your times of prayer not 
for a mere experiment, but as a fixed appointment 


INDISPENSABLE. 827 


never to be discontinued. Go to it in the cold to get 
heat. Go to it in the dark to wait and watch for 
the light. Go to it without inclination, pleading the 
promise of God’s Spirit to give you inclination. 
All this in the rational conviction that, as religion 
is your greatest practical concern, God will be wait- 
ing, on his part, to open the gate for you; to greet, 
accept and bid you everlasting welcome. Now, 
doing this, I can not tell you precisely in what 
manner God will deal with you. I can only prom- 
ise that, as certainly as your times are kept, and 
kept in a desire to find him, he will be found— 
discovered suddenly, it may be, in a revelation un- 
expected ; or you may be drawn along in a way 
more nearly imperceptible, till finally, you scarce 
know when, the conclusion is upon you that you are 
somehow changed. What you began with constraint, 
you somehow love. Your aflinities, feelings, princi- 
ples, motives, aspirations, you know not in what way, 
are certainly recast, and become wondrously new. 
Thus in one way or another it will be with you. <Ac- 
cording to the fidelity of your times, and the steadi- 
ness of your meaning in them, God will give you, 
and with that you must be content. There is no per- 
son living, as I verily believe, who will not thus, 
after some due time, be established in the faith, and 
filled with the revelation of God. Your dawn may 
come straightway like the sun flaming over the hori- 
zon as an outbursting power of day; or it may take 
even three or four whole days to bring it; but it will 


828 ROUTINE OBSERVANCE, ETC. 


: 
come. After two days he will revive us, in the third - 
day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his 
sight. We shall as certainly know as we follow on 
to know the Lord, for his going forth is prepared as 
the morning. 


XVII. 
OUR ADVANTAGE IN BEING FINITE. 


“Thou madest him a little lower than the angels; thou crownedst 
him with glory and honor, and didst set him over the works of thy 
hands.” —Heb. 2: 7. 


BercatsE we are created and finite, the conclusion 
is sprung at once, by many, that we are insignificant. 
And sometimes they will even make a merit of it, 
counting it a way of doing honor to God, that we 
draw as dejected and sorry a figure as possible of our- 
selves. Even as we see in Job’s friend Eliphaz, one 
of those old-time sophists of the East, whose trick it 
is always to be laying, first, their slant of contempt on 
whatever is finite, and then spreading themselves out 
in high airs on the infinite, as if it were altogether in 
their province! ‘Behold he put no trust in his serv- 
ants, and his angels he charged with folly. As to 
them that dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is 
in the dust—they are crushed before the moth.” I read 
from Umbreit’s version. But the sophist keeps on with 
his prating as he began. He not only puts down the 
poor mortal under such frailty that even the moth will 
trample him, but goes on to add that he perishes with- 

28* (329) 


330 OUR ADVANTAGE 


out any regarding it,—lives in but the empty show of — 


excellency, and dies without wisdom. I do not call 
the citing of this libel on God’s work in man, quoting 
Scripture. I only do it, that I may controvert 
and refute the libel. Putting with it also what our 
new-time Eliphazes add, in what they conceive to be 
their more sovereign philosophy; showing that our 
finite consciousness is only a pleasant conceit of being 
something we are not; that what we think our liberty 
is only fate; our sin a thing of circumstance in which 
we foolishly make ourselves guilty ; our immortality a 
merely fond illusion. Se we get a last shove towards 
nothingness, and in that we go down, sometimes quite 
out of sight of ourselves; saying, how often,—<No 
matter, let God, or fate take care of us; for we are 
really too nearly nothing, to be of any great conse- 
quence, whether to ourselves or to each other.” Atro- 
phy, complete moral atrophy, is the certain result of 
this most unnecessary and unjust self-depreciation ; 
and there can be no other. 
In the passage from which I speak, I begin at quite 


a i aa it 


another point, where God’s well authorized teacher - 


shows Him magnifying “his creature—putting even 
glory and honor upon him, enduing him with prerog- 
ative, setting him in dominion. He is not proposing 
to magnify God by crushing down his creature, but by 
raising him up, rather, into power and majesty. 


When I read this passage of Scripture, indeed, I am 


not quite sure that the Uncreated being is more privi- 
leged than the created ; and it is this grand positivity 


IN BEING FINITE. 331 


of privilege that I now undertake to show. Dis- 
tinguishing between the two great conditions or kinds 
of being, the Uncreated and the created, the Infinite 
and the finite, the Supreme and the subject, I propose, 
using these terms interchangeably,—for they mean, as 
far as we are now concerned, the same thing,—to give 
a merely calm, just statement of the created, the finite, 


the subject, which will show them in place, as the ge- 


ologist might say, and will practically magnify their 
significance as no most flaming and declamatory exhi- 
bition possibly can. 


It is a very conclusive and short argument that I 
put at the head in this discussion ; viz., that all the wis- 
dom and character there may be in the Uncreated, will 
of course be entered somehow into the advancement 
of the created. So that whoever depreciates his work, 
depreciates him. Of course he has not put his infinite 
quantities into every or any finite creature, but all the 
wisdom he has, all the goodness, all the privilege of 
nature that he has in himself, is just so far entered 
into his creature as it can be. It is not so with other 
kinds of creatures, such as animals and stones, for 
they are not reciprocal natures. But the moral nature 
of man is reciprocal, and is, by supposition, open as 
by right, to all there is of good in God that can be 
communicated, or received. In this simple fact, of 
answering property and perpetual participation, what 
a conception have we of the privilege of every cre- 
ated moral being, as related to the Uncreated! What 


332 OUR ADVANTAGE 


is it thus for any created mind to be, but glory, an 
honor, and dominion over God’s works? 

But we have a specification to make, in which w 
may begin to see, more distinctly, what advantage we 
have in being finite, or created. I begin with the fa 
that we have a whole class of virtues permitted us 
which are interesting and beautiful in themselves, and 
yet no wise pertinent to God. Temperance, for ex- 
ample, is one; a self-containing, manly habit, as 
respects the uses both of mind and body, that has bea 
abundantly admired and praised by the ripest teachers 
of philosophy. | Contentment, in like manner, is a vir- 
tue that has no place with God, because he has no 
uneasy, malcontent properties in his nature that re- 
quire any such kind of self-regimen to compose and 
sweeten them. Candor is a lovely and just character, 
that is able to hold the reins of judgment impartially, 
against the sway of prejudice and passion. Having 
no such liabilities, God wants no such virtue. Cowr- 
age—we make heroes of courage; but as God has 
nothing to fear, no perils to subdue, he is eternally out 
of range, as regards this noble virtue. Gratitude, most 
honorable to show, and a real beatitude to feel, is no 
privilege of the supreme, or of any but a subject na 
ture. So of prudence, fortitude, economy, and a greai 
many other like qualities; all humble flowers, ye 
even such as God will look upon with delight, thoug 
not in dignity for Him—crocuses, blooming in th 
low chill air of human life, anemones, violets, arbu- 
tuses, of virtue, pricking out close down in the margin, 


IN BEING FINITE. 333 


as it were, of the snows; fair as they know how to be, 
fragrant as they can be, tokens, in that manner, of our 
finite privilege. 

Next,as being creatures and finite we are allowed ta 
grow, as the Supreme Infinite can not. He encoun- 
ters no new ideas, acquires nothing which he had not 
before, beholds what he beheld, and is ever the same 
that he was. We, as being finite, have our best enjoy- 
ment in the sense of progress. We advance in 
thought, we accumulate force, we run with larger vol- 
ume and momentum, as rivers fed by new and larger 
tributaries on their way to thesea. It is very difficult 
for us to conceive the Infinite being as existing in a 
way of eternally stationary completeness, without as- 
sociating some concern lest he be staled in the exactly 
full-orbed perfectness of his knowledge and power. 
Thus the scholar, the clerk, the apprentice, who should 
have it forced upon him, that he is going never to take 
a new idea,never to acquire a more ready dexterity 


in his employment, never to advance upon himself, 


would be utterly crushed by the discovery. Of course 
it is in point to remember that the Eternal Wisdom 
wants no new ideas, because he has all that can ever 
be true already gathered in; fresher too in their old- 
ness, than any that are newly arrived and not yet half 
apprehended can be. He wants no growth, because 


he is full-grown already, and like truth itself, he never 


can be staled in ripeness because he is in beauty ever- 
lastingly fresh-born. But since any such mental stock 
is impossible for us, what is it but our noble privi 


834 OUR ADVANTAGE 


lege, to advance upon ourselves, in a more phenomenal 
and transitional way ? 

Again, it is a very great advantage of our subject 
and created state, that it has a perfectly unknown fu- 
ture. I know it is not so regarded. It even chokes 
our patience, that we can not tear away this veil, or 
fly over this mountain. We worry ourselves in throes. 
of curiosity and auguries of would-be divination, and 
break into bitter complaints, that we can not know what 
shall be on the morrow. But we must be infinite, by 
definition, to have all the future commanded by our 
knowledge, and that by supposition we can not be. 
Most happy for us too, it is. For if we could know 
things future by direct inspection, as God does, it 
would rob us of a great part of the satisfactions of our 
life, and reduce us to a condition of dullness and dry- 
ness quite insufferable. Now, as we have it, every 
| moment is rolling up into knowledge out of the un- 
_ known, and to live is to discover. We are greater 
_ discoverers in fact than Columbus, discovering, each 
\ man, his own new world every day. The very zest 
of life as things are now is enterprise; that going upon 
a venture, which dares the unknown, to wrest victories | 
from it. Hope is now the consummate flower of life; 
whereas if we had the future mapped distinctly out to 
our knowledge, we could hope for nothing. Now 
among all the felicities of God, there is to him no 
place for hope. It is the uncertainty also of life, as a 
future unknown, that constitutes the ever-pressing 
argument for faith, shoving us out upon the help that 


IN BEING FINITE. 835 


is invisible, and the good that is unseen—which faith- 
power is the grand sixth sense of life, outreaching all 
the other senses, and grasping worlds of reality that 
lie beyond their compass altogether. The Infinite be- 
ing doubtless dwells in other felicities that are proper 
to his all-knowing state; but any such kind of knowl- 
edge of the future would plainly enough be a suffoca- 
ting knowledge to us. 
Again, we have relations to equals, and vast oppor- 
tunities of happiness proper to such relations, which 
of course the Infinite being has not, because it is im- 
possible for him to have equals. How much this 
means we can easily discover, if we note what kind of 
unsociety we suffer when we have about us only per- 
sons very unequal—too far above us, or too far below. 
These great inequalities it is that furnish picturesque 
opportunities of favor bestowed or benefit received, 
and so impart a high-toned relish to life; and yet our 
staple enjoyments come, for the most part, from such 
as are more nearly our equals, and there is a peculiar 
and most welcome flavor in such. The acts we per- 
form and the sentiments we cherish towards such, are 
what they perform and cherish towards us. No im- 
-mensely superior being among ourselves could give us 
any such common-leyel tributes of respect or approba- 
tion ; and we could not easily aspire to render such to 
him. We are commonly jealous, too, of what we im- 
| agine to be patronizing airs. Or perhaps these high 
ones flatter us, to win our returning suffrages of ap- 
-plause. It is not as when old comrades in school, in 


: 
‘ 
7 


336 OUR ADVANTAGE 


suffering and labor, in shipwreck and battle, come 
us in their unaffected, unexaggerated offices of friend- 
ship. On this plane of mortal equality, therefore, we 
have a whole set of principles, virtues, and felicities, 
that belong to our finite privilege, in a way that is 
exclusive ; duties and deeds of courtesy, society, vol- 
untary difircnees hospitable customs, modes, man- 
ners, entertainments, generosities and ways of free- 
dom, that have no fear of cringing, or desire of being 
cringed to, no thought of trespassing, or being tres- 
passed on—all which belong to equals only, and be- 
come a virtue in them that is strictly their own. 
Thus it is the privilege of men, and a very great priv- 
ilege, to know what equals think of them. God has 
no such privilege. It is even impossible for him to 
value what any but creatures vastly inferior, and com- 
paratively low, can think of him, for there are no other. 
We have a certain value of some men’s opinion, but 
God never valued the opinion of any body, unless it 
were to somehow mend it and make it more adequate. 
He may enjoy us certainly, and he does, but only as 
enjoying weakness to make it strong, or such as grope 
that he may give them light—much as we value the 
tottling of a child when we help it to walk. } 

Meantime it is another privilege related to this of 
having equals, that our finite range permits us to have 
superiors, and especially to have and enjoy one great 
superior, the Universal and Supreme Himself. Where- 
as he, whatever joy beside is allowed him, can never 
know what it is to look up to, rest in, or enjoy, any 


4 
° 
y 


IN BEING FINITE. 337 


being greater than himself. As being infinite, he is 
shut up to the solitude of his own incomparable and 
immeasurably transcendent greatness. Therefore, 
some have been so much concerned for his felicity, as 
to be set on contriving how he gets society in the ever- 
lasting Three; supposing that to be even the neces- 
sary condition of his comfortable bestowment. But a. 
trinity not viciously conceived makes God numerally 
one, not any such plurality, or congress in society. 
And even if it made him three co-equal Gods, it 
would not give him a superior. In that respect we 
still have our advantage. We are set thus everlast- 
ingly, in a most dear relation to one, who can be, and 
is, our Infinite Friend. His all-seeing eye keeps 
watch. His all-hearing ear listens. His all-govern- 
ing power is regnant in us and about us. In him we 
have a grandly fortified state. We dwell among mag- 
nitudes and in masses that are centered in his will, 
as secure from injury by them, as if we had infinite 
power and wisdom in ourselves to manage them. 
We live, as it were, in dialogue with infinite great- 
ness. Small in ourselves, we have contemplations, 
and contacts of it, that are putting us always in the 
sense of majesty and strength everlasting, and giving 
us an experience above our own measures. We are 
complemented, infinited, so to speak, in our Great Su- 


-perior. The having such a superior is, in fact, our 


principal significance. Better not to have eyes and 

never to see the sun, than not to know this blessed 

relationality with him. O what beauty, what ever- 
29 


338 OUR ADVANTAGE 


during freshness, what satisfying fullness, what dept 
and height of measure, does it give to our otherwise 
little affairs! Our sceneries have thus an overtowering 
summit, but the lowly valleys and green dales we live 
in are not the léss gladdened by warmth, that they 
are sheltered by heights that look solitary and cold, 
It would of course be freezing cold to any one of us, 
to be shot up, in our littleness, into such solitudes of 
preéminence. But we must not allow the impres- 
sion, that infinite being is of course unprivileged by 
reason of its own magnitudes; for God is not any so 
cold mountain peak of greatness in the world as we 
may think, but a sun of goodness rather, above all 
worlds, having heat in himself for his own everlasting 
comfort and ours besides. Only he can never have 
the peculiar kind of joy in us or any other, that we 
have in him; because there is and can be no other 
high enough to command his admiration, or support 
his homage and trust. : 

At this point, again, we naturally pass to a notice 
of the great and even immeasurable advantage we 
have in being such as may fitly have our opportunity 
in worship. Here we go beyond the mere sense, or 
certified consciousness, of relationality just spoken of. 
We pass into act, and set ourselves adoringly before 
the object of worship. We regard, too, not so much 
his preéminent order and the natural greatness of his 
person, but we are occupied more with his holiness, 
and the beauty and majesty of his moral greatness. 
To worship is to find a joy in prostration before a 


IN BEING FINITE. 3839 


being infinitely pure and perfect. It is to say and to 
sing “hallowed be thy name,” and be hallowed by it 
ourselves. Brought up, as we are, under the blue 
heaven, symbolizing always the purity of God, and 
letting fall its image to waken correspondence in our 
feeling, we are trained, so to speak, for worship. I 
believe it is not commonly thought of, as being in it- 
self a privilege to worship, but it is considered to be 
only a good much commended, because it comes along 
asa prescribed part of our duty in religion. On the 
_ contrary, as we are constituted, there is nothing to be 
_ thought of, or desired, or done, out of the most licen- 
_ tious liberty of choice, at all comparable to the exer- 
_ cise permitted and provided for, of worship itself. In 
) it we rise highest, think the noblest things, burn with 
_ the divinest fires our nature can support. Even as we 
) receive the highest, dearest sentiments that visit our 
_ eyes, in the ranges of nature, making long journeys, 
_ and putting ourselves to undertakings most exhausting 
and perilous, just to get the privilege of wonder, and 
have the sense of beauty and sublime admiration 
| stirred in our feeling. The joy we obtain thus isa 
kind of natural worship, paid to sceneries and sounds, 
| to waterfalls and heaven-piercing mountains, and 
storms of the land, and storms of the sea, to wrath, 
‘and thunder, and power, and color, and beauty. In 
! all which we discover, in a lower key and a compara- 
| tively feeble example, what joy we are made for, in 
ha aying our finite mind exalted by the contemplations, 


and kindled Hu the glow of worship. And it is a joy 
hi: 


7 


840 OUR ADVANTAGE 


of the finite and created only. The Infinite being h 
of course no right or possibility of worship; for there 
is nothing above him to move his homages, or set hi 
in the beatitude of praise. The glorious Amen, the 
awful joy of worship, is permitted creature minds 
alone. q 
Not to multiply points of advantage in the finite, 
without limit, there is yet one other which is not 
strictly incidental, it may be, or necessary to, the rela- 
tion of infinite and finite being, like the points alread 
named, but is even instituted or appointed by God’ 
will and counsel. It is referred to by the apostle hi 
self, wonderingly and with praise, when he names th 
very impressive fact that our Creator has set us ove 
the works of his hands. For it is most remarkabl 
that finite creatures have it given them, on so vast ‘ 
scale, to come in after him and put their finishes on 
his works. Thus he becomes Creator and we sub-crea- 
tors; Saviour, we sub-saviours. In almost every thing, 
finite being is set of course im a subaltern office, who 
nevertheless it is called to fulfill or complete what th 
infinite has begun. Thus God creates in the rough 
land, sea, rivers, mountains, and wild forests. So fi 
only does he make scenery, but he never creates 
proper landscape. The rich fields, and gardens, an 
green meadows and lawns, the open vistas of orn 
ment, the road-ways, bridges, cottages and cleanl 
dressed shores of water—all that constitutes the specia 
beauty of the world, is something added, as finis 
after the world is made; even as our first father w 


ae a 


TF 


nt 
if 
IN BEING FINITE. 341 


: set to dress and keep the garden, and make a finer and 
more properly artistic scene of it. We look abroad 
over almost any landscape, and every thing we see, 
_ except the mere skeleton form, is from the finite crea 
tors who have taken up the rough work that was given 

them, to put their final touch upon it. So of all 
fruits, grains, animals of use; taken as being made, 
they were only wild, half-begotten, misbegotten crea- 
_ tures—apples that were crabs, wheat of a bitter wild- 
rice-looking kernel, horses of the mustang type, and 
size. Not even the flowers, lurking in the woods, 

could show much beauty till they were transplanted 
and taught what shape they might take in their kind, 
and into what colors they might biush. So again of 
government, the infinite of it is represented far back, 
in moral natures, simply configured to right, and then 
it is their finite action that is to build up codes of 
manners, duties, and rights; framing also states, and 
laws, and constitutions, and setting all the ranges of 
family care at work, as so many mills of discipline, to 
mold and model the manhood, that shall be, in the 
childhood that is. In like manner, mind, in its rough 
original, is but a ray of possibility from the infinite, 
which can never be intelligence, in fact, till it strug- 
gies forth itself, or is brought forth by some educating 
help from its kind. Here too laws are from the infi- 
nite, science from the finite—coming out after a long 
time, but always expected to come. So of all high 
eulture, in thought and art, and language. What a 
magnificent temple is built in every great language. 

29* 


B42 OUR ADVANTAGE 


Passing, last of all, to religion, or the christian form 
of it, what do we see, but that when it is done as ta 
the making, it is yet to be finished by the propagation. 
It does not even propose the conversion of the world, 
save by men themselves. It must have its ministries 
in them; it must be reincarnated in the finite genera- 
tions, age upon age, and theirs it must be, to live its 
divine beauty into the world, to preach, and sow, and 
cultivate, and suffer, if need be, till they have leay- 
ened all sin, by the love that isin them. And so it 
comes to pass universally, with how great honor, I 
might almost say deference, shown to creatures in the 
finite, that God, who is the infinite beauty Himself, 
wants to see it bloom in his children. Perhaps it 
could not be distinctly apprehended till they had given 
it their touch themselves. . 

But if there be so many advantages in our subject 
nature, and finite order of being, an objection will 
most likely be interposed, asking what of sin, or moral 
evil, and the liability under which it appears? Is it” 
not the natural and all but necessary incident of our 
limited and progressive endowments. I have no time 
or space here to discuss so large a subject. It is in” 
this fact referred to, as we can not but see, that our 
existence becomes a tragic affair, and are we not 
aware that all greatest movements, and highest exalta- 
tions, whether of action, or sentiment, are closest 
bound up with tragedy ; yielding, in this manner, the 
tenderest and most thrilling delights. Even its woes 
are delights. Shall we not also come up out of our 


IN BEING FINITE. 343 


shame and sorrow, knowing good by the fiery scorch 
of evil, and have it better good because of evil? 
Have we no grand privilege, in this bitter and deep 
story? Of course we are not put into it as privilege, 
for, in some principal sense we put ourselves into it; 
but the very unmaking of it—what can it do but make 
us gods, climbing up out of it into God’s plane, as not 
even the lying serpent imagined. One thing, at least, 
is clear, that our eternal Word can never know, as he 
has given us to know, what it is in so great mortal 
shame and hopelessness, to be visited by a superior na- 
ture’s love, sorrowing tenderly about him, and dying in- © 
to him, as it were, to rally him and win him back to life. 
That is a felicity most grand which never can be his! 


It will probably occur to some of you, in the tracing 
of these illustrations and discovering in them what 
dear privilege there may be,in our subject form 
of being, that possibly we are to apprehend some se- 
eret reason herein of the incarnation, which is not 
often adverted to or conceived. Thus over and above 
what benefits of grace and salvation were proposed, it 
is not absurd to imagine some attractiveness felt in 
our subject conditions themselves. Just as some great 
hero, or apostle, now and then, will love in mere ten- 
derness to become a little child among children, and 
have his part and place with them as anequal. Noth- 
ing is more evident from Christ’s own word and way, 
than that he had great satisfaction in it. Did he not 
come for the joy set before him—set before him, not 


344 OUR ADVANTAGE 


as in prospect, but as a table is set for a guest? Was 

it not confessedly his meat and drink, to be subject 
thus under the Father? Was he not tasting finite 
privilege in it? Was he not acting himself into the 
created, and harvesting in it the fruits of a sweet hu- — 
man obedience? In what deep welcome also did he re- 
ceive the witness—“ This is my beloved son in whom I 
am well pleased ;” remembering just there, we may sup- 
pose, how a good, right man of the old time felt, when 
he had “the testimony that he pleased God.” Not that 
any such humanized privilege was needful to him, but 
that he might magnify our finite lot, by letting the joy — 
of it beam out through his sorrow, and so might give 
us a sufficiently dear, and really divine, opinion of it. 
And so praying that we might have his joy fulfilled 
in us, what did he mean, but that what he found him- 
self, in our finite molds of good, we also might find ? 
What honor therefore did he put on our human form 
of being, that he came into it in such ready humility, 
and went through it so gloriously himself. And what 
has he done for us more impressively, than by setting 
his own divine honors on all our duties and trials and — 
even tears—tempted as we are, faithful as we should 
be, joyful as we may be. Is it then a low, dull life, 
that is given us? Do we long for higher ranges of 
experience? Do we disesteem the scale of our engage- 
ments? Far be it from us, since our own great Lord 
is with us, and every thing we look upon here is hon- 
ored by his part with us in it. If we think it trivial — 
and low to be finite, it was not so to him! 


IN BEING FINITE. 845 


At the same time, while we dare to magnify our 
finite privilege in this manner, let it not be with of 
fense. If we count it a great thing to be finite, and 
sometimes even a condition of privilege beyond what 
belongs to the infinite, we only take the honor and the 


good that are given us. There is no frothiness or con- 


ceit, in this boasting. No, we magnify humanity 
overmuch only when we praise it for a goodness it has 
not, or cover with vain words the sin it has; when we 
make it our gospel to have faith in the dignity of hu- 
man nature, apart from any dignifying power of grace 
and salvation ; when we puff ourselves up into magni- 
tude, by recounting possibilities of greatness already 
trampled and lost, or dress ourselves in shows and 
draperies of virtue too thin to be soundly respected. 
None of these will at all advance the proper estimate 
of our quality. We rise highest, when we discover 
what grand privilege belongs to our finite range itself, 
and level ourselves up towards it in the recovery of 
what we have lost; when we settle into modesty, and 
set ourselves hopefully down to the honest sorrows of 
repentance; when we have it as our just ambition to 
be completely, perfectly finite, filling out the privilege 
of our creature-being, in exactly the measures God has 
set for it. Then too we have gifts how many, and vir- 
tues how beautiful, and joys how blessed, that do not 
some of them belong even to him—having no longer 
any good to hope, or desire, in the conceit of merits 
and virtues that do not anywise belong to us. This in 
fact is the real faith in man, though not exactly that 


846 GUR ADVANTAGE 


of which we hear so much. It is that man can 
reach high enough in his repentances to be so full and — 
great, and be drawn relationally so close to the All — 
lather, as to be complemented everlastingly in his — 
nobler measures. . 
It ought also to be added in this connection, that our : 
very subject should itself sufficiently humble us, to — 
keep off any thought of pride for our humanity; for — 
behold what revelation it makes of the sin of sin, — 
showing us exactly what it is, and wherein its crimi- 
nality lies; viz., in the refusal to be lovingly and just- 
ly finite. It refuses control, and will not have God to — 
reign over it. It does not formally undertake to be — 
infinite, for it would see the absurdity of that, but it 
does undertake, in the negative way, to be exactly — 
that, in refusing to accept the conditions of a merely 
creature life. It shakes off allegiance, it is annoyed 
by commandments and claims of authority. To be 
controlled in duty, to be limited in opportunity, to be 
restricted in liberty, provokes irritation. It bolts out 
from the finite state itself; calls it a chain, tears its law 
aside and breaks away. What could be more grand, 
or a higher appointment, than to fulfill just the true 
creation-measure of God, and be his created, such as 
he has meant and means us to be? Ah, we do not un- © 
derstand, my friends, what sin there is in this our sin— 
how perverse against reason it is, how unjust to God, — 
who'is only contriving in all he appoints for us, and 
all he requires of us, to bring us in, just where we 
shall be most truly and completely ourselves. With- 


& 


IN BEING FINITE. 347 


out being infinite, and plainly enongh there can be 


only one that is, we can not even conceive a state more 
advantaged, than this in which we are set. In a great 
many points it has seeming advantage over even Su- 
preme Being itself. And yet this horrible riot of our 
sin spurns all such advantage, refuses to be so exalted, 
and lets us down, below limitation itself, into woes of 
self-extirpation, such as we must suffer from the waste 
of our disorder, and the bitterly consuming pangs of 
our remorse. God forgive such madness. Still the 
really sad bent of our time, I grieve to say, is towards 
the denial of sin; we resolve it into circumstance, 
we call it a necessity, we even think it a good mis- 
mamed. In one way or another, we contrive to let 
down the guilt of it. I confess that when I draw out 
this conception of advantage in our finite order, I feel 
a more unspeakable horror of this wrong than I know 
how to express. It throws me back on those oft-derid- 
ed words of Scripture, “the exceeding sinfulness of 
sin.” After all, there is no so -faithfully just and 
soundly significant testimony as that. 

There is yet a particular point, on which this subject 


has been pressing from the first, and I can not fitly 


close without demanding for it your special attention ; 
I speak now of the immense and really religious sig- 
nificance it gives to human education. It is in this 
fact of our being finite progressives, that we are edu- 
cable; capable that is of being drawn out towards 


the infinite. Thus, in our human scale, we think one 


thought at a time; the Infinite thinks all thoughts at 


3848 OUR ADVANTAGE 


a time and forever. Our thought runs in successions, 
making only rills or rivulets of motion; his broader, 
vaster measure holds all thoughts in static equilibrium 
together, as an all-comprehending sea, towards which 
our rivulets run. We begin at some given date think- 
ing our first thought, and going on thus, in our human 
curriculum, we try things, we discover, we deduce, 
we memorize; all which is finite operation; the infinite 


} 


: 


has none of it. But there is attainable and is to be, | 


and that is what all education reaches after, a condi- 


tion of correspondence, where every subject thought — 
answers exactly to what is in the Supreme thought; — 


even as David’s, when he sang, “ how precious are thy 


thoughts unto me, O God,” or as Kepler’s, when he — 


sprang up in the fresh discovery of liis problem and 
cried, “ O God I think thy thoughts after thee!” So it 
is that all the truth we find is truth to God, and if we 
find any thing which is not truth to God, it is a lie. 
The same is to be said of moral opinions and princi- 
ples; we find no law of righteousness which is not a 
law for all beings and worlds; for the finite, and as 
certainly too for the infinite. Science makes no true 
discovery save as it opens into some law, which is 
God’s thought threading the creation. Learning or 


literary culture approaches its true end only as it at- — 


tains to ideas, inspirations, and modes of skilled com- 


posure that belong to the everlasting proprieties. All 
true education travels up thus towards the infinite — 


reason, and the culmination of it is religion; other 


IN BEING FINITE. 849 


culmination it has none, and without this it is alto 
gether headless and chaotic. 

How grand a thing then, in this view, is education, 
and withal if we could see it,a thing how nearly 
sacred. It is even a kind of church life in the temple 
of knowledge, whose inmost shrine contains the ark 
of God; and if it does not bring us finally to Him, the 
cultus operated by our study is but a kind of nonsense. 
To make a study of astronomy, without looking up, is 
not a whit more absurd. All knowledge that refuses 
to know the highest, and be ended off in the highest, 
is but a sham, a living in the bran that rejects the 
flour. We encounter also just here in this low feed 
of knowledge, and also in the non-improvement or 
misuse of educational advantages generally, the fur- 
ther, more appalling mischief of a stunting of our 
souls; in which we suffocate the very highest func- 
tions of our intelligent nature. Uncreated being, as 
jwe have seen, has no attribute or possibility of 
growth. JInsensate things, such as rocks,and seas of 
water, do not grow. Animals and trees grow a little, 
for a little time, and come to their limit. ‘ But the 
grandest attribute of our created minds, one that be- 
longs to no other finite creature whatever, is that they 
have the gift of a growth everlasting. A fact which 
makes it only the more dreadfully appalling, that they 
can so easily and also fatally shorten back this capac- 
ity, and give it a forever stunted force; for no really 
stunted creature, whether animal or plant or mind, 
after a certain early period, which may be called its 

30 


$50 OUR ADVANTAGE 


growing day, is over, is ever set back to its full grow- 
ing rate again. Even the faithful scholar gets through 
growing size and staple force in a very few years, and, 
after that, only gathers in further contents without 
much enlargement of volume. And what an argu- 
ment have we here for the faithful improvement of al] 
opportunities ; always and every where too for a sound 
self-discipline ; for a nobly pure life; for a godly habit, 
and a vision purified and cleared by the grace of relig: 
ion. For these helps of education rightly improved, 
propose as we have seen a larger man, and to give him 
everlastingly enlarged consequence to himself; while 
the poor idler, the light-headed trifler, who rejects ap- 
plication, gadding always after pleasures and dissipa- 
tions, goes forward into his future to be as insignificant 
there as here, as incapable of thought, as insipid and 
trivial as any growing creature that has lost its day, 
and stopped short in making volume, inevitably must 
be. To break out there, after his education-day is | 
over, and recover his lost volume, is as little to be ex- 
pected as that any dwarf will grow up into a hero. 
O my friends there is no question for a finite creature, 
in his schooling-day, like this—what shall my nature 
be worth, and what amount of being shall I carry 
with me, when I enter the great world before me ? 
The old trivialities are now gone by, the nonsense 
hours are over, and now it only remains to be set 
down in such quantity of being and character, as are 
left—and what shall it be? His privilege was to make 
volume for himself; to be so far a voluntary re-creator 


IN BEING FINITE. 351 


of himself; for his education-right was to be summed 
up, not in his acquirements, but in his enlargements. 
Is he then to be a stunted child when his education 
day is over?—that is the question—or is he to be a 
Man? Ah, my friends, that is what you will very 
soon have decided. 


XV IETS 
THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. 


“Of a truth I perceive that him is no respecter of persons. But 
in every nation, he that feareth him and worketh righteousness is 
accepted with him.”—Acis 10: 34-5, 


Tus most grandly catholic platform of salvation, 
Peter the apostle derives partly from his vision of the 
sheet, and partly from the outside brotherhood which 
his vision of the sheet has prepared him to know and 
acknowledge ; the brotherhood, I mean, of Cornelius. 
This man is a born Pagan, a military captain brought 
up doubtless in the superstitions of the Pantheon, who 
yet gives our apostle to see plainly that he is, in heart, 
a Christian—a Christian, that is, outside of Christian- : 
ity. He has been largely known for a long time as a 
man of prayer, and a thoroughly devout character. 
He is also discovered and approved by God, before he : 
is by Peter; for God even sends an angel to tell him 
—‘ thy prayers and thine alms are come up for a me- 
morial before God.” And as there is always om 
thing better coming, when a man gets heaven’s in- 
dorsement in this manner, word is given him to send 
to Joppa after Peter, and receive from him a more 
competent knowledge of these things. 

(352) 


THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. 853 


Peter then goes down to Cesarea at his call, and 
becomes a guest with him in his house; where he 
hears the whole story of his faith, and learns appar- 


. ently about as much from him, as he from Peter— 


brings out, or matures by his Pagan brother’s help, 
the great banner-principle, from which I am now pro- 
posing to speak. 

In it he corrects the superstition. by which his own 
apostleship had been disfigured; viz., the Jewish no- 
tion of an exclusive right in Israel to the salvation of 
God; taking the broader doctrine of a salvation 
everywhere, and for every body who truly seeks God’s 
light, or whom God’s light effectually finds. 

Have we no similar misconceptions that require to 
be corrected? When we assume, as we do, the inex- 
cusable guiltiness, and the certain exclusion from God, 


- of all idolaters, and all the born subjects of the false 


t 


religions, as in fact we very often do, is not Peter’s 
vision of the sheet as truly for us as for him? Neither 
does it signify any thing, in this matter, that we can 
cite so many denunciations of the Old Testament, to 
just this effect, against the idolaters ; for these denun- 
ciations were not made to the idolaters—they never 
heard of them—but to the people of God, dwelling in 
God’s own light, to deter them from lapsing into idol- 
atry. So when we cite the declaration of the New 
Testament, that “there is no other name given under 
heaven among men, whereby we can be saved, but the 
name of Christ,” do we not fall into just the same mis- 
take, of not observing, that it is we who have heard of 
30* 


354 THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. 


Christ and known his gospel, that are put under this 
ban of exclusion, and not any Pagan people, whe 
have never heard of him, or seen any light but what 
they have in a way more immediate? Nothing is 
more certain than that Peter’s grand charter-principle 
forbids any and all such denouncements. If, in every 
nation, he that feareth God and worketh righteous-— 
ness is accepted, how many may there be that never — 
heard of Christ, and scarcely know God more sufi- 
ciently than as the unknown God, who yet are so far 
right with God, and so truly found of God, as to be 
fitly joined with. us in the common hope of life. We 
hope from within the Bible and the church, and they 
from without, or on the outside of the same. They 
compose the church beyond the church, the unhis- 
toric discipleship, sprinkled over the world in distant 
ages and realms of idolatry, who, without a gospel, — 
have found a virtual gospel by their faith, and learned — 
to walk in God’s private light. That private light is — 
truth unstated probably even by themselves, begin- } 
ning at the feeling, more or less distinct, that there is i 
some Father of all whose offspring they are, which 


unknown Father loves them, and has set them down 
here, in the grand trial of life, to feel after him and, . 
if they may, to find him. They are such as have 
come into the way of holiness by invisible God-help, 
which God-help way of living is in fact a living by 
faith. Such examples may not be numerous, and yet 
they may be more numerous than we think. If they 
were only such as seek after God of their own motion, 


THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. 855 


they might be very few, but since God is seeking after 
them—after all men everywhere—it should not be in- 
credible that some are found by him, and folded in his 
fold, which they do not so much as know. A glance 
also at certain great first principles, particularly the 
three that follow, would induce the hope that many 
more than we commonly suspect, are thus harvested 
for the kingdom— 

First. That God loves all men impartially, and is no 
respecter of persons; having the same desire to be 
loved by all, and be known as their Friend. 

Second. That he is never afar off from any, but is 
close at hand, putting them always on seeking after 
him, in a desire to have them find him. 

Third. That the Spirit of God is present, going 
through all minds, all over the world, moving them 
inwardly, in a way to kindle their yearnings, and 
draw their inclinings towards the inborn grace, that 
will be in turn his finding of them. 

Do not imagine that, in stating these three particu- 
lar premises, I am preparing to discuss the possibility 
of a salvation for the outsiders of the gospel. My ob- 
ject is different ; viz., to show how God finds access to 
such, or by what methods and means works their prety and 
engages them in a felt devotion to his friendship. 

The method I propose to adopt in this inquiry will 
perhaps not be expected. I shall not spread myself 
on nature and Providence, showing what truths of 
natural theology and practical discipline are set open 
there to all, and how the outside men have, to this ex- 


356 THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. 


tent, precisely the same revelation that is given to 
those of the inside. Neither do I propose, in looking 
after such examples, to range the general field of pro- 
fane history, and draw out the characters, here and 
there, that appear to have a tinge of goodness and re- 
ligious devotion. Making the most we can of such 
examples, there will yet be reason left for a good deal 
of doubt in regard to them all. I am going therefore 
into the Bible itself, to find our outside brethren ; just 
where we so often assume that we are not of course to 
look for them. I do it because I shall have them here 
on a right orthodox footing of trust, and shall have 
nothing in fact to do but to consider them, in their su- 
pernatural relations, receiving their calls and private 
lessons, and finding how to know God in the unwrit- 
ten bible of their own personal experience. 

I begin with the case of Enoch. There was no 
written Scripture in his day, and probably no church. 
He appears to have lived a kind of solitary life, which 
is therefore called his walking with God. He was 
probably much derided by the men of his time, which 
made it the almost necessary comfort of his days to 
live “in the testimony that he pleased God.” And 
this testimony was not any audible witness, but the 
witness of the Spirit, who came in at the open door 
of nature set open wider by his faith, till finally he 
became so permeated and leavened by the divine 
affinities, that he went up, and could not any more be 
found. 

Noah appears to have been a character not less sep- 


: 
: 
: 


THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. 3857 


arated from his time. He was a preacher called to 
preach without a Bible—a preacher of righteousness, 
even as God taught him to be. But there were no 
ears to hear. Society itself was a godless and wild 
crew, given up to all kinds of wrong and violence, 
and lost, as it would seem, to even the distinctions of 
virtue. It does not appear that there was any single 
person, out of his own family, that knew any thing 
about God, or had any care for religion. And the 
oracle that found him, and that he himself had no 
skill of his own to find, improbable as it was, so 
verified itself as to put him on building his ark, amid 
the jeers of his people; for God by a process strange- 
ly mysterious, which he could only trust, and could 
not understand, was preparing him to be the new- 
stock father of a new and better age. 

These two examples belong to an outside life, when 
there is no church. We come down next to Abra- 
ham, who stands at the fountain head, or on the fron- 
tier line. In him the church begins, and so far he is 
inside of it. And yet he is prepared, in all important 
respects, by a previous outside training. He had no 
written revelation, and had seen no organized form of 
religion. But he came out of the east, a profoundly 
religious and nobly just character, so far opened to 
God’s Spirit, by his acquaintance with God, that he 
could receive a life-call at first hand, and take the 
necessary guidance in that call. It finds him at 
Haran, far back in the plains of Syria, and going 
forth in it, he begins the church history. Under what 


358 THE OUTSIDE SAINTS, 


kind of training, uniting what kind of advantages, he 
had been brought up, in the far east, we do not know; 
but it afterwards appears, when he sends his servant 
back to the east country, to obtain a wife for his son, 
that all his relations there are, in some sense, religious 
people. Thus when Abraham’s servant arrives, he is 
welcomed in the name of Jehovah, and in some, at 
least, of the proprieties of religion. Still there was 
a mixture of idolatrous corruption that largely in- 
fected their Jehovah worship. Thus when Rachel 
came away, a generation later, pursued by Laban to 
recover the lost gods of his religion, it appears that 
she had hidden among her effects certain little idols, 
or amulets, called teraphim, that were much in vogue, 
at least, among the women. And the coarseness of 
Laban, as also the petty thieving of the gods by his 
daughter, indicate the general style and merit of their 
religion. But how grandly marches out Abraham 
into his call, clearing forever all such trumperies of 
idolatry, and growing into such high intimacy with 
God, that a pure divine religion crystallizes, and begins 
to be organic in his life. He knows nothing of piety 
by definition, or intellectual dissection. He has never 
read Edwards on the Affections, and knows not how 
to square his life by distinctions of motive; has no tests 
of regeneration, practices self-abnegation artlessly, 
without analysis, or even asking what it is. But God 
has him in training, and knows exactly by what les- 
sons to bring him on, as we see in the story of his sac- 
rifice. The problem here is to teach what is yet un- 


; 
: 
| 
: 
: 
: 
: 


THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. 859 


formed in thought, by what is done as in act. The 
two great elements of obedience and trust are set in, 
as by a tragic practice. He is held in deep maze all 
the while as he goes on, emerging at last and brighten- 
ing out in the discovery, that what God is most ex- 
actingly demanding, he is always providing himself a 
lamb to supply. It makes no great difference whether 
we conceive this lesson by action, to be given outside 
of the church or in it; for it could have been there 
and is wanted here. It is alphabetic, any way, and 
the book is to come after the alphabet is made. 
Having given us five books of scripture, Moses will 
naturally be put down as a scripture character. He 
was born moreover of the Jewish stock. And yet, as 
he was a foundling, picked up in the flags of the Nile, 
and carried directly into the Egyptian court, to be 
brought up as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter—nursed 
meantime for only a little while by his own Jewish 
mother—and largely separated afterward from his 
race, scarcely knowing more, it would seem, than the 
fact of his mere blood-connection ; as he was entered 
directly into the Egyptian schools, and applied him- 
self with such enthusiasm as to master all the learn- 
ing of the Egyptians, who at that time were the fore- 


most of all peoples, especially in science; and as we 


find him afterwards building a close commonwealth, 
that is not in any sense Abrahamic or pastoral, but 
territorial and legal and penal, set off in orders and 
tiers both priestly and civil, and having incorporate 
in its laws all the Egyptian therapeutics, and partly 


360 THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. 


their notions of clean and unclean food—havying all 
these facts to be digested, our minds preponderate in 
the conviction that he is to be conceived, up to early 
manhood, as a properly Egyptian character. But the - 
fact of his Jewish origin had reached him, and by 
force of that he broke out in the naturally explosive — 
heat of his youth, to be the avenger of a much abused — 
kinsman of his people. From that moment he was 
launched in his mission, as yet even to himself un- | 
known, and being obliged to flee for his life, he is” 
taken far away to the region back of Horeb, where — 
God has him forty years in training, to get him quali-— 
fied in the matter of a religion. There also it is 
that afterward, Jethro, his father-in-law, a priest of | 
Midian, intervenes to be his teacher and counselor, — 
and Jethro is a wholly outside man, grandly religious © 
and nobly just, able also to help him in his religious — 
development. He also comes back to him after the 
exode, with his nobly paternal and statesmanlike ad-— 
vice, sketching for him—Midian for Israel—a complete 
and masterly outline of his whole civil-service plan. 
So that, on the’whole, we are led to look on Moses as 
a virtual outsider himself, down to the time of his © 
call in the burning bush. His religion, as we can see, — 
is mainly by God’s immediate light, getting appar-— 
ently no help below, save from a man whose religious | 
traditions, if he has any, are as far out of all histone | 
connection as his own. 
A strangely curious episode challenges our attention 
next, in the case of Balaam, the eastern soothsayer. 


THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. 3861 


This man is a great problem, at best, and specially 
in his religious inspirations. The sharpness, and 
beauty, and truly evangelic richness of his oracles, are 
really inimitable. There is nothing finer in the Scrip- 
ture, or at all more vigorously self-evidencing. Nor 
is it any objection that divination was forbidden, about 
this time, by Moses, and declared to be an abomina- 
tion to the Lord; for it had not been forbidden to 
Balaam and the Mesopotamians. And therefore it 
was only natural, perhaps, that he should mix, or be 
supposed to mix, enchantments with his oracles—just 
as our astrologists and alchemists sought religious 
light with mixtures of incantation. He was certainly 
faithful to his convictions, against all the blandish- 
ments employed to win his consent. On the whole, I 
think this man would be acknowledged universally, 
in his truly weird story and character, as a man pro- 


foundly enlightened by God’s secret revelations, if it 


were not for the very harsh strictures put upon him 
afterwards, by the perhaps unjust prejudice of the 


Jews. 


In the book and character of Job we have another 
and more grand episode, so to speak, in the historic 
train of the Bible. Job is not a Jew; the book is 
clearly not a Jewish book; for there are, in fact, no 
Jewish references or allusions in it. The world of 
thought which it opens is a new, un-Jewish, outside 
world. The piety is real and profound, but unhis- 
torical, out of all connection with the Bible history. 
The argument is a matter by itself, supposing a de- 

31 


362 THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. : 


bate with opinions not Jewish. And thus you have 
‘one of the most remarkable books of the Scripture— 
a book that reveals the clearest evidences of inspira- 
tion, and presents the highest summits of sublimity in 
thought and diction, which is, in fact, the book of an 
outsider ; some prince of the Land of Uz, some Ara- 
bian or Mesopotamian poet, some Persian or Baby- 
lonish teacher, wrestling with the great themes of 
God and human life, in the uncovenanted mercies of 
an alien, framing thus a theodicy or vindication of God, 
for all the after-ages of the world and the church. 

At a later period we have the example of Cyrus, 
one of the most remarkable and best characters of the 
ancient history, a great commander and conqueror, 
a great statesman, according to Xenophon a great 
benefactor to his people, humane and just, and withal 
a protector and firm friend of the people of God. He 
it was that gave the decree to Ezra, providing him 
with funds and forces to go back and build the temple 
of his religion, saying—‘‘the God of Israel he is 
God.” And the reason of his conduct is given by the 
prophet, who declares that God unseen has holden his 
right hand, raised him up in righteousness, and direct- 
ed all his ways. He was a monotheist in his re- 
ligion, as all the Persians were, and was therefore con- 
scious of no change in the favor he showed to the peo- 
ple of God; but the prophet declares that God has all 
the while been visiting him unseen, and tempering 
him to his own high counsel—“I have called thee by 
thy name, I have surnamed thee though thou hast not 


i 


“nown me.” And it is a great felicity in this ex- 
_ ample that the unseen access and visitation of God are 
"so grandly affirmed in it. What better footing of 


THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. 363 


| original, first-hand discovery could be desired. 
_ At the very opening of the New Testament we en- 
: counter the Magi, religiously related, in a sense, to 
Cyrus. They were priests of the Medo-Persian re- 
ligion ; astrologers living among the stars, and watch- 
| ing there, to spell God’s oracle, in the changing mo- 
tions. And many of them too became so raised and 
_ spiritualized in habit, as to be not unfitly honored by 
the guidance of a star, and led in to offer the world’s 
first tribute of worship to the new-born Messiah. 
_ The Syrophenician woman, whose faith the Saviour 
so heartily commended, was a Pagan-born woman 
_ probably, and by some heavenly guidance, not unlike- 
_ly, went to Christ for help. 
_ The case of Cornelius we have traced already. 
That of the centurion was like it. And in deliberate 
| comparison of his character with that of his own coun- 
trymen, Christ says—“ Verily I say unto you, I have not 
found so great faith, no, not in Israel.” And he can 
_not stop there—“ I say unto you that many shall come 
from the east and from the west, and from the north 
and from the south—all these from the outside—and 
shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, 
in the kingdom of heaven. But the children of the 
Kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness.” 
-- Imight also turn off here and gather in a roll of 
“names from classic story ; such as Numa, Marcus An 


364 THE -OUTSIDE SAINTS. 


toninus, Plotinus, Plato, and his master Socrates ; 
list fully given would be a long one, and I have no 
room left me to sketch the persons, or verify them as 
men whom God has called to be partakers in his pri- 
vate light. I can only say that the Greek and Roman 
literature, still preserved to us as that of most Pagan 
peoples is not, allows us to look directly into the work- 
ing of the religious nature, in multitudes of serious, 
thoughtful men outside of revelation, and to see just 
where they are—their notions of God and the better 
notions they are struggling after, their half-discoveries, 
their expressed longings after a revelation, their sighs, 
suspirations and prayers, their belief in dreams and 
lying down for dreams, their gropings or almost find- 
ings, their premonitions, their sturdy argumentations, 
their trances of contemplation. Instead of finding 
them quite dead to such themes, it is as if their re 
ligious nature were packed full of questions, and the 
Spirit of God were just about to burst open their 
prison and let them out into the day. They even go 
long journeys, hoping to find perchance some one whe 
can tell them what they want to know. Their own 
yearnings sometimes put them in a state in which they 
lay hold of Christ, at the very first discovery, even as 
a starving man of bread. Thus it is that multitudes 
of souls without a Bible, are turning Godward here 
and there, as being inwardly sought after by God. 
Even as Paul says to the Athenians—“ though he be 
not far from every one of us; for in Him we live, and 


THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. 365d 


: move, and have our being—for we are also his off 
spring.” 

_ If accordingly we go apart still further from the 
region of mental life and culture, among the savage 
tribes, for example, of our own North American con- 
tinent, we shall find many traditions that seem almost 

to have the sanctity of a revelation ; and now and then 

a character appears springing up as a strange solitary 

flower in the wilderness, and assuming all the most 

remarkable distinctions of a genuine piety—as for ex- 
ample in the wild Indian disciple of Brainard ; a man 
who lived apart, as it were, from his time and people, 
coming out among them now and then asa kind of 


saint, to restrain their murderous passions, or call them 
away from the ruinous vice of drink; and when he 
could not prevail, running off into the woods in tears 
of grief which he could not restrain. ‘“ Ah, there 
must be some one,” he would say, “who thinks like 
me; where shall I find him?’ So also there came to 
light not long ago in the wilds of Africa, a woman 
who had been praying many years to some Power Un- 
known, and who, as soon as the story of Jesus was 
given her, exclaimed—* O that is he, the same that I 
have found, and now have always with me.” And 
what should be more credible than just such visita- 
tions, occurring here and there among peoples most 
unfayored? If God is a being whom we need to 
know and naturally yearn after, and if he wants to 
bestow himself on us, why should we wonder that he 
sometimes finds a way through even incapacity itself, 
31* 


366 THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. 


bringing his unchurchly help and sympathy to th 
miserably forlorn one in his outcast lot? : 

I will not pursue this exposition farther. I have 
undertaken to show you what God is doing and car 
do, for the outsiders of his Bible and church. And te 
make the exposition more convincing, I have taken 
my examples almost wholly from the part such 
. outside men have had in the Bible story itself. God 
has had his witnesses, you now see, in every age of the 
world, apart from all connection with his covenant. 
and the organic institutions of his grace in the earth. 
men that have been visited and called by him in the 
solitudes of nature, and there have burned as the si 
lent, separated lights of their times. 


It now remains to say that, in tracing this subject, ] 
have had deliberate respect altogether to uses needed 
by ourselves, in our inside field of gospel truth and 
privilege. My object has not been, to answer the per 
haps merely curious question, what possibilities are 
given to idolaters and heathens, but to gain a positior 
of discovery in regard to the Bible itself—how i 
came, how to use it, what to get under it, and do for 
it; what need of it, in a word, the inside people have 
and how they are to get their best advantage from it. 

First of all, then, we are not to judge that the 
mere possibility of a revelation outside of the Bible 
supersedes the want of it. That was not the opinior 
of God when he sent his angel, even by miracle, tc 


Cornelius, to put him in the way of an apostle, whe 
| 


THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. 367 


should teach him Christ and baptize him in the faith 
of a disciple. The souls most enlightened too by cul- 
ture have been most apt to sigh for authorized teach- 
ers and appointed rites, and a veritable revelation. 
Having gleams of insight, and almost visions of God, 
they wanted it the more. They sighed, and waited, 
and even groaned for it, knocking piteously at the 
gate they knew not how to open. And such as nei- 
ther sighed, nor groaned, nor cared, only wanted it the 
more. Christ not wanted! the Bible not wanted! 
just as well to be without a revelation! What could 
show more affectingly the insupportable destitution of 
such a state, than the gropings and only casual find- 
ings of its hungry millions? Doubtless there is a pos- 
sible salvation for all men without a revelation—I 
verily believe there is—but a naked possibility is alas! 
how slender a footing, where the interest and peril are 
80 great. 
: Then again, secondly, having reached this conclu- 
sion as regards the immense want of a revelation, and 
of Christ as a Saviour, let no one turn the blame upon 
God, that what is so much wanted everywhere, is not 
| everywhere given. Doubtless God might rain show- 
ers of Bibles, just as he does the showers of rain all 
over the lands and even seas of the world, but he 
| must also rain written languages too, and a power to 
read them, beside. And then the readers, if they 
were read, would want to know how the book grew to 
_be a book, the revelation how revealed. And there 
"was no way but to begin, here and there, with natures 


868 ° THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. 


most open, most susceptible, gathering in their several 
seeings and testimonies, and bodying for holy trut 

the word they have received. Ifa Bible could be 
gotten up mechanically, as showers are gotten up in 
the chambers of the sky, it might be justly concluded 
that all men ought to have it. But it has first to be 
incarnated, so to speak, and wrought into humanity, 
much as Christ was, and so revealed through human- 
ity; for the fact is that all such kind of truths must be 
enunciated in persons ; even as the truths of astronomy 
require to be enunciated in orbs and orbits. And 
then, forever after, the truth has to be lived over and 
acted out, by a kind of reincarnation in good men’s 
lives, in order to have its meaning. There must be a 
ministry of love and character going with it ; graces 
to shine, patience to suffer, sacrifices, labors, prayers, 
ordinances and rites of worship, and assemblies kin- 
dled by their glow, else the book is dead, or too nearly 
so, both for want of meaning and of evidence. And 
so you perceive that Bibles could not be made faster 
than men are good enough to have revelations made 
through them; and could not be multiplied or dissem- 
inated faster or farther than the graces of love and 
sacrifice, and the patiently enduring and bravely dar- 
ing enterprises are quickened, that shall carry them 
abroad and preach them. Bibles therefore can not 
outgrow or outrun the church. And God is not to 
blame for this. However much they are wanted, the 

can not, in the nature of things, out-travel the gra 

they nourish. If it takes a million of years to get 


; THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. 369 


them published in this way everywhere, then it must 
take a million of years. Enough that Christ began to 

speed them on, at once, by his word, saying—“ Be- 
hold the fields already white to the harvest.” And 
again that he gave it for his parting charge—“ Go ye 
into all the world and preach the gospel to every 
creature.” Long ages ago, God was ready, going be- 
fore his people, wanting to be revealed in every soul’s 
knowledge. O ye long-delaying ages, linger no more. 
Gird us with salvation, Lord, for the dear Bible’s sake, 
that we may give it speedily to every hungry, darkened 
soul on earth! 

But here another and third lesson meets us; viz., 
that we are not to push the dissemination of this gos- 
pel by any false argument that dishonors God. Tell 

us not that every idolater, every man ignorant of 
Christ must perish—does everlastingly perish. Why 
‘should we push ourselves to this work of gospeling 
_ the world, by putting it on God, that he has given no 
| possibility of life to so many millions of immortal 
creatures, reserving them all unto wrath, just because 
_ they were born into a lot of darkness? Rather let us 
tell what God is doing always for them, how nigh he 
is to them, how tenderly he works in them, what pos- 
sibilities he opens for them, and how certainly he 
sometimes gains them to his love. Let it be enough 
that their disadvantages are so great; that they are 
humbled toa point so low by their idols, rotted into 
falsehood, buried in lust and shame, made crafty, per- 
-fidious, cruel and wretched in society ; not finding how 


4 
a 
1, 


870 THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. 


to interpret their own longings in religion, when such 
longings rise, or to climb up out of the thraldom in 
which they lie. Then, as we are so gloriously privi 
leged, what shall we do but give them our privilege, 
and have it as argument enough that if we do it not, 
we show how very little our privilege has done for us. 
.Meantime, fourthly, let us have it as one of our 
most sacred duties to the Bible, not to use it, so as to 
shut ourselves and all that have it, away from God’s 
immediate revelation by it. The external, verbal rey- 
elation is not given to be a substitute for the interna 
and immediate, but to be a guide into that. We are 
to find God after all by an immediate knowledge our- 
selves, just as all the outside saints have found him 
only with an immense help in the Bible, which they 
had not. We are not to know God simply as reading 
the book, and getting notions or distillations of dogma 
and catechism from it in our head, living thus on a 
mere second-hand knowledge. That is making a fence 
of the book, requiring us to get all light from it, and 
not from God. No, the Bible is received only when 
it is spiritually discerned; that is when it brings us 
in where God is, to know him by our faith and love, 
and have him in a first-hand knowledge, even as 
Abraham had, or Job, or Jethro, or Cornelius. And 
then when the unbelievers about us complain that God 
is so far off, wondering why he does not show himself 
to his children, if he exists, by signs and wonders that 
can not be doubted, we shall not have made their dif 
ficulty just what it is ourselves, by setting up the Bible 


THE OUTSIDE SAINTS, 871 


as the sum and last limit of knowledge, and not asa 
helper to find it. If we desire to know Boston, 
the map of the way will not show it, but will only 
take us thither, and let us get the knowledge for our- 
selves. The Bible in like manner tells us how others 
found Him, that we may find Him also. We do not 
know God in simply knowing their work. We only 
know him by an immediate knowledge, even as they 
did. If we use the book only for the notions, or the 
second-hand knowledge it gives us, we even make a 
barrier of it, and put God further away. The right use 
of it will not give us notions about God, but God him- 
self. It will make God nigh, and make it felt that he 
is nigh, both to ourselves and to others, present to 
knowledge, pressing into knowledge in all human 
breasts. 

: It is a most sad thing, my friends, that many of you, 
not in the way of religion, so little conceive the near- 
ness of God to.you. You know the Bible, and what 
‘may be known about God as reported in it, still noth- 
ing appears to be concluded ; you are not established 
in any thing, but filled with questions only, and put 
| groping. The Bible, after all, leaves God a practically 
hidden subject, and you turn away from it, wondering 
still where God is, and why he does not somehow 
‘show himself. Little do you conceive how very nigh 
he is, and how he is pressing in, through the Bible, 
through nature, everywhere and always, to be known 
‘by you, and by every human creature in the world. 
‘At is with you here and with all men, as it is with cer- 


I 


872 THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. 


tain valleys in our great country, where the soil is 
derlaid with vast stores of water, pressing upward 
get vent, and the people have nothing required to set 
fountains spouting at their doors, but simply to bore a 
passage through the crust of earth, and let the waters 
up. Just so all created mind is underlaid with the 
knowledge of God, having oracles set in its secret 
depths, so that whosoever will let the everlasting love 
and presence force itself in, or up, will have an imme 
diate and pure, an original and free knowledge, a liy- 
ing water that will freshen its life and slake its thirst 
forever. He gives you his revelation without, only 
that he may be thus revealed within. He loves to be 
known, publishes himself in all things visible, speaks 
in all things audible, fills all height and depth with 
his presence, besets you behind and before by his 
counsel, and there is no soul living that he does not 
breathe in by his Spirit. All souls are his children, 
yours among the number. As he came to Job, and 
Cyrus, and Cornelius, so he will to you, if only you 
are sufficiently opened to him by your prayers and 
alms, and works of faith to let him in. Having 
one revelation of Christ in your hand, you will have 
another in your heart. You will grow into a full, orig. 
inal, clear beholding, not needing that any man teach 
you, having that anointing that teacheth all things 
This is your privilege—would that you could see it 
in this light of God to live, and in its ever brightening 
splendor to die. 

In closing this subject let us not forget to cast 


THE OUTSIDE SAINTS. 3873 


| glance forward to the future life, in which all right: 
eous souls are to be gathered. Many of them will be: 
long to the class of inside saints, some to the class of 
outside saints; the former will have known Christ all 
| their lives long, and been fashioned by his new cre- 
| ating gospel and character; the latter will now meet 
| him perhaps for the first time, and will salute him in 
blissful discovery, as the unknown friend they had al- 
ways with them, and the conscious helper of their life. 
| When therefore, my brethren, you lift your song of 
praise to the Lamb, some of these will be able to 
tell you more of his worth, it may be, by their 
want of him, and their struggles after God with- 
out him, than you by all you have gotten from him. 
To meet and commune with these outside saints, 
outside no longer—how blessed will it be? And 
what a beautiful variety will they give to the gen- 
eral brotherhood! They are brothers whom you 
did not know, but you embrace them even the 
more tenderly, and hold them in the dearest honor. 
Thus grandly now is the Master’s word fulfilled— 
“Other sheep I have which are not of this fold; 
them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice, 
and there shall be one fold and one shepherd.” 

32 


XIX. 


FREE TO AMUSEMENTS, AND T00 FREE TO 
WANT THEM. 


“Tf any of them that believe not bid you to a feast, and ye be dis- 
posed to go, whatever is set before you eat, asking no question for con- 
science’ sake.”—1 Cor. 10: 27. 


ee 


Turse feasts to which the Corinthian disciples are 
invited, are sometimes rated by the apostle himself as 
“banquetings and abominable idolatries.” Though 
probably the feasts thus designated were the great reli. 
gious festivals, which were often mere orgies of lust— 
celebrated of course, not by invitation, but at times 
of stated recurrence. The feasts to which he is refer- 
ring here appear to be only ordinary entertainments 
or feasts of invitation; though even at these the guest 
will not seldom encounter many disgusting excesses 
and laxities of behavior—a fact which even makes it 
somewhat remarkable, that a disciplinarian as positive 
and faithful as our great apostle, does not forbid the 
acceptance of such invitations. 

I discover two points included in the advice he 
gives, neither of which stands out on the face of his 
words, but they only need to be named to be dis- 
tinctly seen. The first is that down upon the low. 
plane of mere ethical observance, he does not think it~ 

(374) 
: 


; 


FREE TO AMUSEMENTS, ETO. 375 


incumbent on him, as a teacher of the gospel, to 
enforce any Puritanically close terms of restrictive 
morality. It is not for him to legislate over such 
questions. In this field the disciples must have their 
own liberty, and be responsible for their own judg- 
ments and the right understanding of their own liabil- 
ities. So far the world’s law is also theirs, and he will 


" not undertake at all to settle the casuistries occurring 


under it. And to set them on a yet manlier footing 
of liberty, he shoves restriction still further away by 
telling them, when they accept such an invitation, to go 
with a free mind, hampered by no foolish scruples that 
will make them an annoyance, both to the host and 
the company. 

So far then he sets them free—free that is in the 
exercise of their own responsible judgment, clear of 
any mere scruples not intelligent. But we have 
scarcely noted the position given them under this lib- 
erty, when we begin to see that he is thinking of a 
second, higher kind of liberty for them, which, in his 
own view, makes the other quite insignificant. Thus 
he drops in, as it were in undertone, at the middle of his 
sentence, this very brief but very significant clause— 
“and ye be disposed to go”—putting, I conceive, a 
partly sad cadence in his words, as if saying inwardly, 
I trust not many will be so disposed; for the dear love 
of God, in the glorious liberty of our discipleship, 
ought to be a liberty too full, and sweet, and positive, 
and blessed, to allow any such hankering after 
questionable pleasures and light-minded gaieties. 


376 FREE TO AMUSEMENTS, 


In that we are free, and in this more free; too 
free to want the other kind of freedom, or care any- 
thing for it. Which distinction thus developed I 


now propose to use, in its application to another, but 


not very different subject; viz., the true law and right 
use of amusements. I think we can see that the apostle — 


would speak on this question, precisely as he does of 
mingling in the entertainments and festivities of the 
unbelievers. Indeed the two matters are too nearly 


one to be easily distinguished in their reasons and goy- — 


erning principles. Entertainments are amusements, 
and amusements entertainments. We begin then— 
I. At the free; taking up the question of amuse- 
ments as a question of ethics, or common morality ; 
which, in all the discussions I have seen, is taken to 
cover the whole ground of the subject; as if it were 
the only matter to settle our opinion of what is right 
under the world’s law—what is proper, becoming, and 
safe. And here it is that the apostle begins, though 
he has other and higher points to raise, we shall see, 
in a different key. In this view, or in this plane of 
ethics, it is not to be judged a sin, he says, if you go 
to the entertainments where you are invited. It may 
be, or it may not, and of that you must every man 
judge for yourselves, in your own freedom, at your 
own responsibility. If you want the exhilaration, 
there is nothing morally wrong in exhilaration. If 
you want the festive play, such play is forbidden by 
no common principle of life. But it is incumbent on 
you, if you go, that you go to be one with the com- 


| 
| 
| 


AND TOO FREE TO WANT THEM. 377 


pany. Togo half condemning yourself in what you al- 
low, to go packed full of little timid scruples, abstain- 
ing, questioning, and making yourself an annoyance 
to the company, is even a christian impropriety or ab- 
surdity planned for beforehand. Undertaking to en- 
joy the occasion you must not churlishly mar the 
enjoyment, by looking askance and timidly on every 
thing done. You must not be asking whether this 
thing or that, which is innocent in itself, has been 
flavored by some form of incantation; whether this 
or that article of food has been seasoned from a cup 
partly offered in libation. Be not there as a man tied 
up in scruples, but as a man rather who is free, and 
knows how to enjoy the innocent hilarities of the oc- 
casion. If you speak of duty, this is your duty, else 
it was your duty not to be there. You are not there 
to be higgling at questions of casuistry about things 
innocent in themselves. 

Taking now this ground, we have a broad, just plat- 
form-charter for all manner of amusements not licen- 
tious, or corrupt, or indulged beyond the limits of tem- 
perate use. And it would be well if certain over-rigid 
disciples, and teachers of religion, much honored in the 
former times, had been able to allow and justify this 
kind of freedom. Such were always asking questions 
for conscience’ sake, about things that are really inno- 
cent in every thing but abuse or excess; and gave in 
this manner an air of austerity to religion that was 
only forbidding and repulsive; creating reactions also 
for infidelity or the total rejection of religion itself, 

32* 


378 FREE TO AMUSEMENTS, 


that have been growing more and more detrimental in 
their effect. Happily some of our most forward and 
capable teachers now are pressing a revision of the 
whole matter, and cutting loose detentions of seruple, 
in reference to a great part of the amusements that in — 
times past were put in embargo. They take up the 
question of amusements as a question of morality, 
and bring out their decisions in the plane of ethical 
adjustment. And the general conclusion is that of the — 
apostle—be free, only be responsible for all excesses — 
and abuses. Do not reduce religion to the grade of a 
police arrangement, and make it a law of restriction — 
upon the world’s innocent pleasures. It can not afford - 
to hold a position so odious, and withal so nearly false ; 
for there is no sound principle of ethics that makes it 


Se ee 


a wrong, or a sin, to indulge in plays and games of © 
amusement, save when they are carried beyond amuse- 
ment, and made instruments of vice, or vicious indul- 
gence ; when of course they are wrong, even as feed- 
ing itself may be. Why strain a principle of restric- 
tion till it breaks, and lets out the waters of sin to 
sweep it clean away, and all sound virtue with it? 
Draw out terms of detention just where detention is 
wanted, and not a long way back, to make sure of al- 
lowing no possible danger. Why, there is danger in 
food—must we therefore keep it off by starvation, or 
must we set limits on it by the right use of our liberty ? 
There is, I grant, no kind of amusement that may 
not be the beginning of some vicious excess. But if 
we are to cut off every thing which has a danger in it, — 


AND TOO FREE TO WANT THEM. 379 


and may easily run itself into excess, we shall have 
almost nothing left. There is a possible intemperance 
even in the use of water. Dress has this danger. 
Study has it. There is no kind of business that may 
not easily rush itself into some infatuation, or finally 
some course of fraud that blasts the character. Polit- 
ical life—who that goes into it, with however good in- 
tentions, does not put himself in fearfully critical mo- 
mentum towards bad associations, and selfish combi 
nations that are corrupt? Even religion may hurry 
itself into excesses of fanaticism, that rapidly burn 
out character. Every thing in short requires self-reg- 
ulative prudence. Innocent in itself, it can be, and 
very often is, a gate that opens towards excess. The 
true thing to be said is—all these things are free. 
Refuse them not, but have a guard against their perils. 
We can not refuse every thing that has perils in it, for 
then we should stand back from every thing. Take 
amusements under the same law; not to be mastered 
by them, but to master them, and be just so much 
further advanced in all high manly virtues 

Sometimes a distinction is attempted between recre- 
tions and amusements. But as all recreations are in 
some sense amusements, and all amusements recrea- 
tive in the same manner, the distinction is of no great 
value. The distinction between athletic sports and 
amusements holds good partially, because of the gym- 
nastic effects obtained by one, and not by the other. 
Boating, fishing, hunting, bowling, base ball, and the 
like, have a certain value as modes of athletic exer 


380 FREE TO AMUSEMENTS, 


cise, and yet there is not one of them that may not be 


connected with gaming or some other kind of license. 
Let every man have his liberty in them, detained by 
no foolish and weak scruples, and then let him be re- 
sponsible to himself, for such kind of practice in them 
as belongs to a pure, well kept life. Let him not be 
afraid to enjoy himself in them, or be tormented by 
foolish misgivings, as if it must be wrong to have 
such pleasures. Ask no questions for conscience’ sake 
till the confines of just use are reached. 

The same is to be said of dancing. If there be 
lewd dances, whether round or square, as we certainly 
know there are, these are for nobody. Masquerade 
balls are contrived possibilities of license, and belong 
to high society only when it runs low. Late hours of 
dancing, in crowded assemblies, heated by exhilarating 
bowls, are both morally and physically bad, and the 
true discretion is to avoid what takes away discretion. 


But dancing itself is beautiful movement, and may — 


well be a recreation wholly innocent and pure. Music 


is the chime of motion, and motion in the beat of mu- — 


sic touches a fine, deep law of the creation. And if 
there be exhilaration in it, why should there not be, 
when the rhythm of the world prepares it? 

Billiards have been largely connected, and now are, 
with the vices of drink and gambling. The public 
tables of cities are commonly infested by this danger. 
But as private tables multiply, the perils of the game 
are much less felt, and many are inquiring whether 
any other indoor amusement can be found that is less 


AND TOO FREE TO WANT THEM. 3881 


a exceptionable in itself, or has more to commend it. 


Men and women and invalids can have the game to- 
gether, and it is not in any sense a game of chance, 
It provides a mild, gently athletic exercise. It trains 
an exact eye, and an exact hand, and a close computa- 
tion of the combinations of causes, all of which are 
gifts of great value. It is only a little more fascina- 
ting than it should be, and is likely to occupy time 
that should be given to other things. The same too 
may be said less emphatically of croquet, which is 
only a kind of out-door billiards. It has, too, just 
as little inherent connection with gaming. Must 
we add that when billiards are practiced at pub- 
lic tables, and the defeated party takes the expense by 
forfeit, with perhaps another forfeit in cigars and wine, 
there is a double peril incurred, both of gaming and 
of a drinking-habit. All such dangers are factitious 
as regards the play itself, and will less and less appear 
when it is an accepted pastime, and is set in its proper 
place. 

Games of chance, like cards, and dominoes, and 
backgammon, have a certain recreative value, but 
no value as exercise. They are objected to by many 
because they are games of chance; and, to a certain 
extent, with reason; for if any young person gets 
absorbed in that kind of game, so far as to have the 
habit of his mind cast by it, he is just so far incapaci- 
tated for the wise conduct of life. Who can be weak- — 
er or more nearly a fool, than a man who goes into 
life looking for luck in every thing, expecting to get 


382 FREE TO AMUSEMENTS, 


on by luck and seeing really no other hope. Still 
there is a certain diversion in seeing, for an hour, how — 
chances go, and even a kind of instruction beside; for 
a great many things in the world are turned, as far as 
our human perception goes, by what to us are chances. 
The sound rule here appears to be, that no one should ~ 
be so much in these weaker games, as to be addled 
by them, and forget that carving out his way by stout 
endeavor, and a keen perceptive judgment of causes, 
is the true manly wisdom. He may play with chances 
enough to see how they go, but if he worships them 
as a devotee, and lives in their thin atmosphere, he 
will be as nearly nobody as he can be and be a man. 
Sometimes it is urged for these lighter games that they 
make society. Rather say substitute society ; for that 

is their worst objection. To shuttle, and cut, and deal, 
and throw the dice, are exactly not society, but when 
over indulged are just the way to keep it off, and make 
an empty-headed play of the fingers, the only accom- 
plishment learned or possible to be enjoyed. Conver- 
sation, humor, social and intellectual vivacity, get no 
place to grow at these tables, where the parties wink 
and do not speak, and where the glow is kindled by 
the chances ; not by the souls engaged. 

The opera is a kind of amusement that is furnished 
by one of the finest of the fine arts. It is music float- 
ing in sentiment, or sentiment dramatized in music. 
It is very nearly as good as a good concert, and scarce- 
ly more objectionable—only it can be, and sometimes 
is, a great deal worse. Be it as it may, a man who 


AND TOO FREE TO WANT THEM. 383 


finds no atmosphere but this to nee in, no food but 
this soft luxury to enjoy, will turn out finally to be a 
man wholly steeped in sentimentalities, having no 
great purposes and manly energies left. 

The theater is or ought to be the most robust of all 
amusements not athletic, but in its common associa- 
tions, it is worst and really lowest of all. To take it 
in this day and find amusement in it requires a man 
some way down the scale of pure sensibility already ; 
otherwise the atmosphere will have a smell of disgust. 
Were a true redemption possible, it might teach great 
lessons of virtue and character, and be even more and 
better than amusement. If sometime a man asserts 
his liberty in going, he will yet much better keep his 
liberty in staying away. 

So far we go in tracing the right of amusements 
viewed in the plane of morality, or moral casuistry. 
Considering the question on its mere ethical grounds, 
we find no law against amusements, but only against 
their excesses and abuses. As Paul said to the Corin- 
thians so we say, be free; make up no mere scheme of 
legal, self-restrictive, or ascetic virtue. Ask no ques- 
tions for conscience’ sake, such as badger and worry 


_ the soul’s liberty. Christianity is no dog Cerberus 


barking at the gates of festivity, and galling the neck 


_ of all innocent pleasures.. Least of all does it contrive 


to force a new chapter into the code of morals, that 
was not in it before, and can not be maintained by its 
accepted principles. 

If now some of you should be surprised and alarmed, 


384 FREE TO AMUSEMENTS, 


by the exposition thus far made,—the same which ig 
now being offered by many, as a complete exposition 
of the whole subject—there is yet another and very 
different exposition to be added, which is even the dis- 
tinctly christian part of it. As we have asserted the 
free, so we now go on— 
II. To assert the more free. Thus the apostle, when’ 
he slides in his subjunctive clause—“ and ye be dis-| 
posed to go”—does it, we may see, regretfully and 
with a feeling sadly overcast. He understands that. 
many of the best beloved, godliest, and freest of the 
brotherhood will not be disposed to go, could not in 
fact be so disposed. They are in so great liberty that 
their inclination itself is quite taken away, and he 
wishes, how tenderly, it were so with all—as alas, he 
knows it is not. Did he want himself to go to those 
feasts of the unbelievers? Could he think with desire 
of having a good time there and being greatly re- 
freshed by the hilarities of the guests? And why not? 
We can not imagine such a thing, and why not? Be- 
cause his great and gloriously Christed soul is too full, 
and ranging in a plane of joy too high, to think of 
finding a pleasure in such trifling gaieties. They are 
chaff, only chaff, to him. So when he says—“and ye 
be disposed to go,” he well understands that there are 
some who will not be disposed. Kept back by no 
ascetic scruples, or legal restrictions binding their con- 
sciences, they will be kept back by their very fullness’ 
and freedom and the uplifting sense of Christ which 
ennobles their life, They are free in a sense to do it, 


a 


AND TOO FREE TO WANT THEM. 3885 


but they are also more free, too free to have any dispo- 
sition that way. Their tastes are too high, their incli- 
nations too transcendently pure, and the gale of the 
spirit raises them into a divine liberty that is itself the 
crowning state of life. The mere hilarities of feasting 
are too coarse and tumultuous to suit the key of their 
feeling, and will only be disturbances of their peace. 
They are able to come down now and then it may be, 
and touch the plane of nature in ways of playfulness ; 
but it will not be to launch themselves on tides of high 
excitement, and be floated clean away, but only to 
freshen a little the natural zest of things, and keep off 
the moroseness of a too rigid and total separation from 
the socialities and playtimes of the world. 

Our question of amusements then appears to be 
very nearly settled by the tenor of the distinctively 
christian life itself. The christian in so far as he is a 
christian, is not down upon the footing of a mere eth- 
ical practice, asking what he may do, and what he is 
restricted from doing, under the legal sanctions of 
morality. That kind of motivity is very much gone 
by. He has come out even from under the ten com- 
mandments—mostly negative and restrictive—into the 
love-law which unites him to God and his neighbor. 
And here, out of his mere liberty in love, he will do 
more and better things than all codes of ethics and 
moral-law commandments require of him. He isso 
united to God himself, through Christ and the Spirit, 
that he has all duty in him by a free inspiration. For 
where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. He 

33 


386 FREE TO AMUSEMENTS, 


acts now from the full, not from the empty; having 
inclinations outrunning mere duties, and doing all 
things, so to speak, by the overplus of joy. He is not 
shriveled in scruple, but full-orbed in love; and if he | 
asks, at all, what is duty to be done, it is not what is ” 
duty by the moral code, under its legal motivities, but — 
only what is due to the supreme affection that has 
united him to God and His Son. So that when you | 
come to him offering some kind of amusement, he 
does not fall back straightway on his conscience, ask- 
ing whether he may have it, or trying whether he can 
tease the reluctant monitor into acquiescence,—he 
does nothing in that way of legal exaction—but he 
says more likely to the offered amusement, “ No, I do 
not want it ;” or, in the apostle’s word, “I am not dis- 
posed” that way. And this he does without debate — 
of privilege, and without any argument of constraint; 
he must even constrain himself not to say it. Others 
looking on may judge that he is under they know not 
what scruples, and is making himself unhappy by not 
daring to claim their enjoyments, but it is they that 
are in the absurdity, not he. He is only too free in his 
great, nobly divine pleasures, to find any thing but 
loss and meagre littleness in theirs. Their world is 
not his world, and he has renounced their world, not 
because he must, which they probably think, but 
because he has gotten by it and above it. 

And here is the reason, I conceive, why we keep on 
debating this question as we do, in the footing of the 
mere mordlities. The people of the world bring it 


AND TOO FREE TO WANT THEM. 387 


always to that standard, and do not imagine that 
christian souls can bring it to any other. And even 
they, when taken off from so many amusements by the 
new inspirations of their life, do not see quite likely 
that, being a question of practice, it need not therefore 
be a question of mere ethical morality ; and so they let 
it be debated for them on the same old footing. 
Whereas what they now call duty is a wholly different 
matter; viz., what is due to their new footing of lib- 
erty and unity with God. And it turns out by a sim- 
ilar mistake, that graciously enlightened teachers 
themselves, are all the while debating the question of 
amusements, even for christian people, as if it were a 
question only of good morals. If they accurately un- 
derstand where christian souls really are, and how, in 
their divine ranges of liberty, they are lifted into other 
dispositions and higher kinds of enjoyment, they 
would put the question of amusements in a very differ- 
ent way. It is not the question whether we are bound 
thus and thus, in terms of morality, and so obliged to 
abstain; but whether, as our new and nobler life im- 
pels, we are not required, in full fidelity, to pay it 
honor, and keep its nobler tastes unmarred by descend- 
ing to that which they have so far left behind them. 
It may be well to put the question in a different 
way, which yet will not be really different except in 
the form. It comes to us every hour, that men who 
are deeply immersed in some great work, or cause, 
have no care for any thing else, least of all for any 
thing that appears to be trivial. Indeed almost any 


388 FREE TO AMUSEMENTS, 


thing is like to seem trivial, which is not in the line of — 


their engagement, even though it has far greater con- 
sequence. Any thing which has become the supreme 
end of life, sinks the significance of every thing else. 
In the pursuit of gain, if we speak of nothing higher, 
they will look upon amusements how commonly as 
mere nonsense, and will sometimes even forget the 
feeding of their bodies. How then will it be when a 


christian man has become thoroughly engulfed in the — 
work and cause of his Master? It is now his passion. 


He wants nothing else. He only wants to love it 


more, and do more for it, and, compared with this, — 


every thing is trivial; he has no taste for the gaieties 


of mere natural. pleasure. Christian people are set off — 


thus, in a sense, from the amusements other people 


delight in, by the’ stress of their own new love, and — 


the heavenly engagements into which it brings them. 


Of course, on mere ethical grounds, they have a — 


right to do just what every body has, to claim all the 
justifiable amusements, and go as far in them as moral 


safety may allow, but to claim that right, they must 


descend a long way into the spirit, as into the law, of 
_ the world, and be really of it themselves. These 
things we say are innocent, but they are not innocent 

to them, because they bring down a spirit lifted far 
~ above into better affinities, and nobler ranges of good. 


Here open accordingly some very deep lessons for — 
christian souls, that must not be lost. Being not sim- — 


ply free, as all men are, to have their amusements, 


they should also be more free, free enough not to want — 


AND TOO FREE TO WANT THEM. 3889 


them; or to want them, at least, only in some very 
qualified and partial way. 

A young christian, for example, goes to his pastor 
and says, “There is going to be a masquerade party, 
or it may be a great game supper and dancing party, 
where many of my friends are to be, and I am invit- 
ed; will it be wrong for me to go?” “ No, not wrong, 
the answer must be, as far as the mere question of 
morality is concerned. But I am none the less sorry 
to see that you want to be there. It shows that you 
have either lost ground, or that you have not gotten 
as far forward as I hoped in your christian life. You 
certainly might be close enough to your Saviour not to 
be disposed to go, deep enough in the conscious joy 
and serenity of your love to be totally indisposed to 
go. But you seem not to have reached this height. 
Go then, if you will, but understand exactly what it 
signifies. To be restrained, or kept back, by mere 
seruple, at the legal point of morality, will do you no 
good. Andif I should raise a scruple for you here, 
and you still should go, it would only put you in a 
struggle with your conscience, and set you on contriv- 
ing moral arguments of defense, for what is only spir- 
itual defeat, or defection. If you are disposed to go, 
it is better for you to go understanding what it means, 
and have nothing else to think of.” 

And what shall we say of the many christian peo- 
ple so called, who are always putting the question of 
amusements on trial, under the test arguments of com- 
mon morality? Where is the harm, they ask, of this 

83* 


390 FREE TO AMUSEMENTS, 


or that? Where is the principle? What is the law 
that condemns it? Is it not better in these innocent 
matters to be free? Yes, and is it not better yet to 
be more free?—to be living in ranges of illumination 
so clear and full, and in holy liberty so high, that ne 
such hankering after the little driblets and titillations 
of pleasures called amusements, will be felt? God’s 
true saints below, even like the saints above, should be 
a great way in advance of any such unsaintly kinds 
of privilege. 

Others again who do not mean to claim any such 


privilege, as for themselves, have much to say of doing — 


what they can for their young people, and the green 
age of society, in preparing festivities and pleasures, 
such as will keep off the impression that religion is 
an austere matter, having only frowns to bestow on 
the common amenities of life. But no such impres- 
sion of austerity is ever given, I feel bound to say, 
when religion is so lived as to be an atmosphere of joy 
and true liberty. Here is no austerity, or the look of 
it, but there is a glow, an ever-bright content and 
hopefulness, a jubilant, all-loving sympathy, which 
keeps every thing fresh and sweet as the morning. 
Of course there should be gentle unbendings, and 
moderate connivings at play, such as will suffice to 
show that no morbid, self-restrictive, legally distem- 
pered conscientiousness makes a bondage of duty. 
All mere niggard scruples, and rigidities of scrupu- 
losity, must be evidently far away. And they will, in 


fact, be farther away from all christian people, living | 


AND TOO FREE TO WANTTHEM. 891 


as in joy, than from any that make a point of catering 
for amusements, when living in evident dearth and 
dryness. What are these dry, dreary people doing, 
some will ask, but contriving how to moisten a little 
the aridities they live in? 

Besides, we need not be greatly concerned lest the 
green age, down upon the plain of nature, will not 
find as many festivities and ways of hilarity as are 
really wanted, even if christian friends should not be 
making up card-parties, and dancing-parties, and pri- 
vate theatricals for them. Why, there is no trip-ham- 
mer beat, that keeps up a louder and more constant 
noise, than the advertising racket of our newspapers ; 
‘telling, every night and morning, what new shows 
and budgets of fun are ready to be opened—circuses, 
rope-dances, feats of magic, troupes of colored min- 
strelsy, menageries, learned birds and pigs, automaton 
players, gift-concerts, operas, public balls, theaters, 
anniversary dinners, and I know not what beside. 
Our very brain is put a-whirling, if we try to just 
keep track of the diversions promised. Many of 
these things are innocent enough in themselves, some 
of them instructive, but we have altogether too much 
of them. And too much of innocent amusement is not 
innocent, but even morally bad, another name for dis- 
sipation itself. Hence in this view the very last thing 


any christian person, woman or man, need concern | 


| 
a 


. . . Sulrcs ° . | 
himself about, just now, is the contriving of diversions 


to relieve the austerity of religion. It may be that 
, we sometimes take on a hard, dry, God-forsaken look 


392 FREE TO AMUSEMENTS, 


in the religion we have; alas! I fear it is true, but O 
if we had more, if we had enough to live in it and by 


it, there would be no so glad faces, or winning graces 
of life, as our liberty in the Spirit would show. The 


very atmosphere of such is fresh and bright and free 
as the day dawn. They live above scruple, they do 
nothing by constraint, they go beaming where they — 
go. Every one sees that they have the deepest satis- 


factions, and are most completely alive of all people 
that live. They will bend sometimes to indulgences, 
which the churlish miscalled saints, living under 
scruple or ascetic law, condemn, but it will be evident 
that they rather yield to them in amiable deference to 
others, than want them for themselves. Or if they 


do it now and then, as in deference to their own nat-— 
ural instinct of play, it will seem that they are only 
freer because they are full, and not that they are 


craving such allowance because they are empty. It is 
hardly necessary to say, that they will not be averted, 
even by their liberty itself, from any festivities or 
games that are athletic, or belong to the gymnastics 


of bodily exercise. They are human and have human ~ 


bodies; and it is not supposable that the joys of the 
spirit should make them neglectful of the joys of 
health, and the full-toned vigor of the body. Even 
the Spirit of the Lord, we are told, does not withhold 
his quickening touch from mortal bodies. 

But must we not, some very conscientious disciples 
will ask, be faithful to put a frown upon these pleas- 


ures in the lower plane of morality? must we not: 


AND TOO FREE TO WANT THEM. 393 


declare them to be wrong and raise a testimony 
against them? That is about the worst thing a true 
christian can do. They are not wrong in themselves. 
It is you that have gone above them and their law, 
not they that have come up into conflict with you. 
The opposition between you and them is without 
any real contrariety of principle; you being swayed 
by religious inspirations and they by rules of ethics | 
legally applied. And there is nothing you can do 
against religion more hurtful, than to make it the 
foe of all innocent enjoyments, in the reach of such 
as have not the higher resources of religion. 


It only remains to notice certain interpellations by 
which one or another will think our conclusions may 
be turned. Thus it will be suggested by some who 
mean to be disciples, but are living in a key so 
low as to be over fond of amusements, that the class 
who are not disposed to go with them, must be chris- 
tians of a superlative order, such as all who are to be 


_ saved need not of course be. They certainly are su- 
. perlative in the comparison suggested ; but whether 


they are better christians than they need be, or than 
all ought to be, is a difficult and rather delicate ques- 
tion. Whoever is contriving, by how little faith or 
how little grace, and with how large interspersing of 
gayeties and worldly pleasure, he may make his title 
to salvation good, is engaged in a very critical experi- 
ment. He is trying how to be a christian without 
being at all asaintly person; how to love God enough, 


394 FREE TO AMUSEMENTS, 
without loving him enough to be taken away from his 
lighter pleasures; and he really thinks that aiming low 
enough to be a little of a christian, he still may just. 
hit the target on the lower edge. Perhaps he will, 
but is he sure of it? And if he really is, what miser- 
able economy is it to beso little in the love of God 
and the joys of a glorious devotion, that he can be 
just empty enough to want his deficit made up by 
amusements? If that will answer, a very mean soul, 
certainly, can be saved. 

Another class, not christian and never pretending 
to be, are out upon such kind of people as get to be 
miserably over-good, and can not take the fun of life 
as it comes. They do not want such christians. It 


~makes them angry to see them, set aloof by what they 


call their piety, from even innocent amusements and 
pleasures. ‘If any thing can make us infidels to the 
end of the chapter, it is to see how all human pleas- 
ures turn sour under the look of these people.” Well, 
it may be that God has not undertaken to make people 
good to order, after your particular style, and whether 
your style or his is better, he will certainly take his 
own. But will it make you an infidel to see human 
beings, naturally just as fond of pleasure, and every 
way as selfish as you, so thoroughly given to works of 
mercy and sacrifice, so fascinated by God’s pure chari- 
ties, so deep in the abysses of his love, that they have 
not a sigh, or a want, for the dear gaieties you live in ? 
I can hardly believe it. On the contrary, it seems to 
me that such a fact should convince you, if any thing 


AND TOO FREE TO WANT THEM. 395 


ean, that what has so wonderfully exalted them will 
equally exalt you. Surely it must needs make a very 


eat difference in the soul’s outlook on every thing; 
gr y g 


‘whether it has God revealed within, or is living with 


out God. Might it not make as great difference in 
yours? Therefore when you say that you do not want 
such christians, might not all your impressions be dif- 
ferent, if only you knew what they so perfectly know, 


in their better plane of life? There certainly should 


not be any thing odious in a life whose quality is 
grounded in the simple love of God. 

Well, it comes back then, after all, a larger number 
in more various shades of character will say, to this ; 
that all christian people are restricted and put under 


bonds not to allow themselves any liberties of amuse- 
ment. And since we all alike are put in obligation to 


be christian, what is the conclusion we arrive at, but 


_ that we are all under the same restrictions, shut up to 


all the austerities of religion that we just now thought 


_ were to be escaped? That is no fair conclusion, or in 


fact any conclusion at all. Doubtless every nominally 
christian man is bound to be thoroughly christian. 
And so is every unbeliever, every really unchristian 
man. But take it as we may, our being bound thus uni- 
versally to the choice of Christ, does not any way touch 
the matter of the amusements; for who ever comes 
to Christ as a disciple, is never cut off from these 
because he is under requirement to that effect, he only 
drops them out because he does not want them, and is 
turned away from them by his new-born liberty itself. 


es 


eee 


396 FREE TO AMUSEMENTS, ETC, 


Here then, my friends, in this high plane of roy 
liberty, it is our privilege and calling to live. World 
ly minds, minds faintly christian, if such are possible, 
can hardly imagine, rushing as they do in their empti- 
ness after all kinds of pleasurable diversion, to fill u 
the void of their feeling, what supreme fullness of lift 
is here vouchsafed us. They even look askance upon 
our gospel, as if it were proposing to shorten thei 
privilege, and cut off the few endurable things they are 
able to find in the world. Unspeakable delusion !— 
would that they could see it. No, my friends. The 
real purpose of our gospel is to set us clear of all re- 
strictions whatever that work legally, and bring us 
out to reign with God in God’s own liberty. It says, 
“all things are yours,” and permits us to live in that 
broad wealth which consists in universal possession. 
Nothing is farther off and deeper down below it, than 
that we are now to be set in scruple, and careful de- 
bate, about what social pleasures and diversions are 
permitted, and what forbidden us. Permitted or for- 
bidden, we shall not want them, or go after them, 
because they are chaff to us; and we only let our 
gospel down below itself, when we assume that any 
thing can be settled for Christ in that plane of argu- 
ment. We have meat to eat which is better. We 
sit in the heavenly places, having it ever as our 
prime distinction there, that we would rather suffer 
with our Master, than be feasted without him, and 
would even willingly die to behold his face. 


XX. 
THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 


_ "Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus 
Christ. No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs 
of this life, that he may please him who hath chosen him to be 
a soldier..—2 Tim. 2: 3-4. 


Tue Christian life is often illustrated, as here, by 
“some comparison or figure derived from military life. 
Sometimes the comparison is general; as when the 
whole struggle is called a warfare. Sometimes the 
particular point of the comparison turns on the mat- 
ter of persistency; as in the resisting unto blood. 
Sometimes on the matter of courage; as when the 
righteous are declared to wax valiant in fight. Some- 
times on the precision of stroke and parry in close 
combat with evil; as when one fights in a cavalry 
charge—not uncertainly, or as beating the air. In the 
passage from which I now propose to speak, the point 
of the comparison is different—it relates to the strin- 
gent and exact discipline of the military service; the 
total separation of the soldier from his own private af- 
fairs, and the absolute subjection of his body and life 
to the hardships of the camp, and the will of his com- 

mander. 

34 (397) 


‘listment or a forced levy; no matter whether it be 


, of the war. He belongs to the state just as the can 


398 THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 


The life of a soldier is the hardest, roughest, most 
exactly restricted life to which a human being is ever 
subjected, and it is well understood, as a first maxim 
of military science, that it must be so. It makes no 
difference, therefore, whether it be a volunteer en- 


the army of a free state or of a despotism; it is well 
understood that it must, in either case, be subjected 
to the same stern military discipline. 

The general-in-chief, in the first place, must have no 
questions of his own about the policy or righteousness 


non do, and he must go exactly where he is sent, to 
fight the war prescribed. His subordinate officers, in 
all grades, must be as implicitly subject to him as he 
to the civil power, and the soldier must be subject to 
them in the same manner. The army is, in fact, to be 
a variously compounded, closely compacted machine, 
whose wheels and limbs of motion are men—the 
bodies and minds of men. They are to move with an 
exactly timed and exactly measured step, all as one. 
They are to be wheeled up into the cannon’s mouth of 
the enemy, just as they are wheeled about in a parade 
exercise, having no more question of danger, or of 
self-preservation, than if they were made of the same 
material as the truck-machines of their cannon, 
They are to wade through swamps and rivers, at the 
word of command; to sleep on the ground, if need 
be, without shelter; to live on the coarsest, saltest 
fare; and when it is required, on half allowance of 


THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 399 


that ; to keep their sentry-walk in the rain, just as it 
is set; or, if they must, to stiffen there in the winter’s 
cold, sooner than leave the beat assigned. If they 
have a home and children, it is to be nothing, as long 
as they are in the field. If they have lands that want 
their care and culture, harvests waiting to be reaped, 
property and debts that require their attention, these 
are nothing—no man that warreth entangleth himself 
with the affairs of this life, that he may please him 
that hath chosen him to be a soldier. If his superior 
in command is tyrannical and harsh, he must choke 
his resentments and not vent his impatience in words 
of complaint; for that alone, if permitted, would 
loosen the fiber of order and discipline. When a vic- 
tory is gained, it must be enough that his leader is ap- 
‘plauded. Or if some other subordinate, less deserving 
than himself, is commended for promotion, he must take 
it as the fortune of war and be silent. Nay he must 
even have a certain soldierly pride in not whimper- 
ing or complaining of any thing. In a word, he must 
endure hardness as a good soldier ; for it is the manner 


of a soldier to endure every thing, bear every priva- 
| tion, without a murmur of discontent ; to eat what is 
given him, march when the surgeon decides that he 
‘is well, whether he can stand or not; melt or freeze, 
Jeave his body on the plain, or give it to fill a ditch 
before the enemy’s ramparts, just as the cause or word 
of command requires. This too, neither in a way of 
dogged selfcompulsion, nor of timid and slavish sub- 
| jection. It must be done with appetite and ardor; 


400 THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. | 


for the true ideal of the military discipline is n 
reached or realized, and the army is not set in the 
true fighting order, till what is called an esprit de comp. 
is formed, such that individuals forget themselves in 
the spirit, and pride, and fire, of the common body 
and their common cause. It is to be as if the cause 
were beating time like a march, in their hearts, anc 
the tramp that measures their step, were but empha 
sizing the common purpose of assault and the commor 
confidence of victory. In this army spirit, or en 
thusiasm, which consummates the drill and discipline. 
every thing is done with freedom, because the individ. 
ual consciousness is burned up, so to speak, in the 
common fire of the camp, or campaign. The soldier 
cares no more for himself. He lives in his command 
er, and the brave monster called an army, that hi 
commander has organized. Or sometimes it will be 
true as just now it is with us, that, apart from any 
power of drill, a grand enthusiasm for his country 
and its laws has taken possession of the soldier, and 
so far sunk his individuality, that he throws in ease. 
and home, and children, and life itself, caring nothing 
for the sacrifice, and scarcely remembering his par- 
ticular, infinitesimal self any longer. And this, in 
some form, is the condition of all true military power. 
Having lost this fire of the camp, the army is said to 
be “demoralized.” Having never found it, the army 
will be only as an army of sheep going to the 
slaughter. 


THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 401 


Now the apostle, as we have seen, conceives the 


christian calling and service, under the analogies of 


; 


the camp and a military soldierhood; and I have 
drawn out this brief picture of the military order and 
organization, that we may trace the lesson he gives 
us, in some of the great points of correspondence, 


where the analogies are most instructive and im- 


pressive. 
It is not conceived of course that the christian disci- 


_ ple, enrolled in his Master’s service, is to encounter all 
the bad points which give so hard a look to military 


life. He perfectly knows that he is not thrust forward 


in a bad cause, or a cause of which he has any the 


least doubt. He knows beforehand, too, that his 
cause is sure of victory; not perhaps of immediate 
victory, not of any such victory possibly as insures 


_ against temporary defeat, and even long ages of losing 


experience and discouraging warfare. Still he has 
this one point given him to fasten his courage, which 
is given, never, to a contesting army; viz., that his 
cause is absolutely sure of victory at the last. Itisa 
great point also of distinction, that no injustice is 
going to be done him. Nothing will ever be required 
of him that violates his own personal convictions, or 
breaks down the integrity of his judgments. He will 
suffer wrong by no fraud, or prejudice, or partiality, 
of his superior commander, but will be estimated al- 
ways exactly according to his own soldierly merit and 
his faithful prowess in the field. His fellow-men or 
fellow-disciples may not do him justice, but may even 
34* 


put dishonor on him where he is to be most truly hon- 
ored. Still he will only be the more highly estimated 
by his great leader, that he stands fast when beset by 
so much of hostility and detraction around him, doing 
just the service which others most decry and hold in 
least esteem. 

Abating now so many points of wrong, or unright- 
eous severity in the conditions of army service—for 
God has never any unjust or over severe terms to lay 
upon his servants—there is yet a very strongly marked , 
similarity between that service and the christian dis- 
cipline. His enrollment for such discipline includes 
the totality even of the man. He is to keep nothing 
back, but to put in home, honse, worldly property and 
business, and even life itself. He engages to endure 
hardness as a good soldier, and even more absolutely 
than’ any army soldier not to entangle himself with 
the affairs of this life. He takes a kind of military 
oath, in fact, to follow his Master, and do his perfect 
will; to renounce all delicacy and self-indulgence, to 
endure privation, to not shrink from distress and tor- 
ment, and even to witness a true confession by the 
martyr’s fires. No ties of kindred or country are to 
detain him from going where he is sent, or doing what | 
he is commanded. And what is wholly peculiar to 
his kind of warfare, he is to fight alone, when called to 
it, and maintain his charge even against the world. 
In the service of arms soldiers go to the charge, or the 
contest together, under one or generally several com- | 
manders; but the soldier of Christ stands out often by | 


402 THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 


| 
j 


i THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 4038 


| himself, in solitary warfare, where he is to win his vic- 
tory for God and truth alone. More generally he 
| will have multitudes enlisted with him, and the great 
army of believers will be set in the drill with him and 
he with them, all to be responsible, in a degree, for 
each other. They are all to have their appointed 
places and times, and come into the close fixed order 
| of a compact system. They must take every man his “ 
part under the great leader, throwing nothing over 
upon others which is given them to do, and they must 
take the peril of it as being kindled for it, in the glo- 
‘rious common passion of the common cause. Pa- 
‘tience, endurance, courage, fidelity and even a kind of 
-eelestial impassivity, must be set in their otherwise in- 
‘constant, misgiving, self-indulgent nature. And the 
‘only tonic force equal to this must be found in devo- 
tion to the Master, carried to the pitch of soldierhood 
in his cause. The service they are in will often be 
hard, a drill of duty and observance dreadfully irk- 
| some to the flesh, but as soon as they find how to put 
every thing into it, and have gotten all their thoughts, 
feelings, fancies, wishes, enlisted for the war, and all 
private liberties and caprices of will subjected to the 
-eamp order of the mind, even the hardness itself will 
jpecome a kind of buoyancy and celestial aspiration. 


| 


_ Now this representation of the christian life, by means 
‘of the military, is one that is rich in spiritual instruction, 
‘as regards a great many points of principal significance. 
‘Some of those I will now undertake to present. 


esi 


404 THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 


I begin with the particular matter suggested by 
apostle; viz., the putting off or excision of the world 
as an interruptive and disqualifying power. We ge 
weary of hearing so much said against the world, 
so many cautions set against it, so many renuncia- 
tions and denunciations piled up to fence it away. 
Why such a fear, a jealousy so wearisome, of the 
world? Is it a bad world? Has God made some 
mistake in the constitution of it? -Is there not 
something ascetic, something a little superstitious, 
and to speak plainly, something a little unrespee 
able in this world-renouncing way? And when 
we insist on the unworldly character of all true 
disciples, and hold up such as examples of a spe 
cially standard character, what is it, they ask 
but a milksop that we make our ideal man? 
Do we then put this same judgment dow 
upon the soldier, taken away, as he is, from al 
his affairs and affections; his property, his home 
his business and business-custom; forbidden now t 
use a finger for his private and personal interests 
or even to let his family at home have plac 
enough in him, to so much as slacken his feelin 
in the duties of the camp? But why is this 
why is he allowed no more to have any world, or an 
thing but a body in drill, and a mind set for endur 
ance? Is he thus unworlded to take the mettle out of 
him? Does it in fact make a poltroon of him or me 
broth of a man, as we just now heard of the un 
worldly Christian? Does not every military com 


THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 405 


-mander know that, letting his men go home once a 
month, and come back with their heads full of family 


and business cares, unmans them practically, for the 


time, and so far incapacitates them for any brave, 
_tough-handed service. The only way to make great 
| soldiership, as he well understands, is to take his men 
completely out of the home world, and have them cir- 
_ eumscribed and shut in by drill, as being mortgaged in 
_ body and life for their country. Trained to flinch at 
nothing and suffer any thing, he makes them first im- 


passive, and so, brave. And under this same law it is 


_ that all christian disciples are required to strip for the 


war, throwing off all their detentions, all the seduc- 


tions of business, property, pleasure and affection. 


All such matters must now drop into secondary 


' places, for the understanding is, that no one gets the 


great heart, or becomes in any sense a hero, till his very 


life is drunk up in his commander, and his supreme 
_ care to please him that hath chosen him to be a sol- 


dier. Instead of being weakened by the stern renun- 
ciations of his unworldly discipline, it is precisely this 


which gives him all robustness and heroic fire in his 


calling. In just this drill too have all God’s might- 
_ jest witnesses been trained. 


Consider next how the military discipline raises 
spirit and high impulse by a training under authority, 
exact and absolute. In which we see, that going by 


authority and being always kept under Christ’s posi- 


tive command, is not a way, as some might think, of 
diminishing our personal vigor, and reducing our 


406 THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 


pitch in the manly parts of conduct. Be it so that we 
have it put upon us by Christ, as the perpetual charge | 
of our life, to keep his commandments. And then let 
the question come, how we are going to preserve any | 
real personality, without having, in some large degree, 
our own way? Can any thing save us from a total in-~ 
capacity, when we are required to be acting, moment 
by moment, under authority? Does it then reduce 
the soldiers and all the subordinate commanders of an 
army to mere ciphers, when they are required to 
march, and wheel, and lift every foot, and set every 
muscle, by the word of authority; when even the 
music is commandment, and to feed, and sleep, and 
not sleep are by requirement? Why, the service 
rightly maintained invigorates every manly quality 
rather; for they are in a great cause, moying with 
great emphasis, having thus great thoughts ranging in 
them and, it may be, great inspirations. Not many 
of them ever had as great before, or ever will have 
again. And all these powers are the more wholesome, 
that they come in as commandment; for it is one of — 
the grandest functional superiorities in man, that he can 
be commanded as the animals can not; that his nature 
is not a block but a drum, reverberative, grandly, to — 
whatever highest thing is sounded. So that, after all, — 
and say what we will of our own personal free arbit-— 
rament, the grandest things that ever come into us are 
commanded in. We even get more volume by what 
is commanded us, than by all that we do. Authority, © 
authority, God’s all-dominant, supreme authority, is 


THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 407 


our noblest educator ; for more than all things else it 
wakens up our life, and impregnates our sentiment 
with all that is most heroically true and good. Our 
human nature is most blest and exalted in its hom- 
ages ; and no soul is so miserably unblest agvone that 
. never had any. To be governed, it is true, is some- 
times nothing different from being thrust down, but 
to be governed for a cause, or an idea, is to be graded 
up in pitch and not down. When our soldiers return 
from their campaign, how often is it remarked of one 
or another, that his good-for-nothingness is somehow 
taken away, and that his very gait is manlier ; as if he 
were aman squared up by command, and the new-felt 
possibility of consequence to his country. And so 
when the soldiers of Christ throng in after their great 
campaign is over, what will be more surely discovered 
in them, than their everlasting ennoblement in 
Christ’s great will and commandment. And yet 
not that so much by what he commands, as by the 
reverberative sense of being under a command so 
high. 

Another lesson even more instructive. How often 
is it imagined, by outside beholders, or felt by slack- 
minded, self-indulgent disciples, that the military 
stringency of the christian life is a condition of bond- 
age. The disciple puts his liberty in mortgage, it is 
thought, and is never any more to be free. The very 
conception of a life so bitterly scathed and cut away 
_ by self-renunciation, is wearisome, ungenial, and re- 
pulsive—is there not some conception of a good life 


408 THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 


more generous in the style of it, and such as better 
accords with the liberality of the christian salvation ? 
Since Christ has made us free, why not stand fast in 


our liberty? Yes, but how are we going to stand fast — 


in liberty, when liberty itself is standing fast in noth- 
ing, keeping no fixed terms at all? Why, it is even 
the chief matter of the military drill and the string- 
ent closeness of it, that by no other means can the 
liberties of impulse and inspired momentum be raised. 


The cause is nothing till the camp begets a soul for it, 


and the camp is disciplined for that end. And the 
understanding is, in every qualified commander, that 


he never gets the free, great spirit into his men, till he © 
gets them solidified in drill, under his peremptory — 
word. He must train their every motion, if possible, — 


to be commanded by him. And if at any time the 
discipline gets relaxed or broken down, then the army, 
as he well understands, will be demoralized, because 
no common impulse takes them longer, and no grand 
martial fire is possible to be kindled in their inspira- 
tions. They are no more held in hand closely enough 
by the discipline, to put them in impulse and the 
swing of liberty. Their cause, however good, inspires 
them no longer. Just so the christian body is pre- 
pared for the exaltations of liberty, by consenting, 
every one, to the exact discipline of a soldier. Keep- 
ing the walk of Christ, as he would the beat of a sen- 
tinel, obeying under mandate, taking the rule of duty 
in exact observance, inquiring always what God lays 
it upon him to do, what place to fill, what sacrifices to 


THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 409 


make, what hardness to endure—coming under the 
yoke thus to learn, he does indeed learn, and finds it 
a yoke most easy ; nay, even freedom itself. Just ac- 
cordingly as he sinks himself in the steadiness and com- 
pleteness of his obedience, he mounts into liberty. 
Here courage springs, and all the free-born senti- 
ments of inspiration break into play. 

This matter of liberty is, alas! how little under- 
stood, even by those who most harangue the people 
and the political assemblages concerning it. Liberty is 
not the being let alone, or allowed to have every thing 
our own way. If it were, the wild beasts would be 
more advanced in it than all states and peoples. No, 
there is no proper liberty but under rule, and in the 
sense of rule. It holds high sisterhood with law, nay 
it is twin-born with law itself. Even our existence 
droops and drags a chain, if it can not touch some 
principled way of order, to be ennobled by it. There 
is, in fact, no bondage so dreadfully sterile as vaga- 
bondage ; that which strays and straggles where it 
will, and finds no hand of discipline ever laid upon it. 
It is in a slavery most dreadful because it has no sig. 
nificance to itself. Hence it is that the strictness and 
stiffness of the army discipline, that which puts the 
soldier under guard because he does not set his eye by 
command, or comes on parade with an untied shoe— 
hence it is, I say, that in such condensation of disci- 
pline, the army breaks into liberty, rushing even upon 
death itself. It does not grope along the roads and 
fences vagabond-wise, but it bounds over all barriers by 

35 


410 THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 


the word that isin it; blazing like a fire-tempest in the 2 
faces of the enemy. Self-consideration is gone out, | 
the word and the cause are all that is left. § 

This is liberty, and spiritual liberty is close akin. 4 
It is being in such drill under Christ’s commandments, — 
that it has no longer any thought of cost or conse- 
quences. It goes by no constraint but only by incli- 
nation, and the more strictly it has learned to obey, — 
the more exactly, tenderly conscientious, it has be- : 
come ; if it is not slavish in its exactness, but is caring — 
only to please him that hath chosen it to be his sol-_ 
dier, the more gloriously free it will be. There will not 
be a galling thing in the service; even the self-denials, — 
if there be any, will be free. The discipline looks 
hard, I confess, when regarded from afar and exter- ; 
nally —even an apostle calls it enduring hardness— 
and yet the stringency of it makes it the spring of — 
liberty. No such liberty, no real liberty at all of the © 
spirit, could be made by any smoother and more re- 
laxed process. There isa kind of strictness, I grant, 
which can well enough be pitied; viz., the strictness — 
of cowardly scruple and fear, but when the man is” 


‘tet 


full up with his law, commanding himself in it, all 
such expenditure of pity may be saved. That man 
“walks at liberty because he keeps God’s precepts,” — 
and he keeps them not as tugging up anxiously 
after them, but as a military body-guard set for 
their defense. Plainly enough there is no bondage 
here. 


Let us also take another lesson from the military 


THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 411 


discipline, finding in it how to put a more genial look 
on our crosses and required self-denials. Ungenial 
and repulsive as the law of the camp may be, there is 
no such thing in it as enduring hardness for hardness’ 


_ sake, no peremptory commandment for command- 


ment’s sake. Such kind of discipline would not be 
training, but extirpation rather. And yet how many 
of us christian disciples fall into notions of christian 
self-denial that include exactly this mistake. As if it 
_ were a proper christian thing to be always scoring, 
and stripping, and mortifying ourselves. How shall 
we ever be true soldiers, if we do not make a hard 
time of it? how shall we resist unto blood if we do not 
make a fight, and press hard enough to bleed in it ? 
Thus how many who really wanted to be soldiers have 
retired into cells, renouncing family comfort and love; 
or renouncing marriage ; or renouncing shoes; or re- 
nouncing even their consciences—taking spiritual di- 
rectors, by implicit obedience to whose ghastly dicta- 
tions they may kill out even their private will and 
judgment, and all deepest convictions even of their 
personality. All which is just as good and no better 
than the discipline of an army kept up, not to make 
an army, but to unmake the men. No such army dis- 
cipline was ever heard of. Alas that we should have 
it in the church, and that not merely in the ascetic 
schools of the monks, but in a presence more subtle 
and scarcely less desolating among our Protestant peo- 
ples. What is self-denial as we most frequently think 
it, but a practice of self-deprivation? And then havy- 


412 THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 


ing made our mistake, we either put ourselves to it, 
making life a desert, and calling it our piety; or we 
only make a feint of compliance, and drop into a piety 
more stunted, because it is confessedly wanting in the 
chief thing. It is very much as if the soldier, instead 
of throwing life and home, and every thing most 
dear, upon the service of his country, were put to 
the drill for stripping them away, no matter for the 
country. That would be rank military oppression, 
and not any army discipline at all. Let us not 


think much of the christian soldierhood, endured by — 


the poor monks, in the dismal abnegations of their 
so called self-denial; as little of their groans of bond- 


age and sorrow, shut in by the walls, where as 


prisoners of God, they have spent their weary blight- 
ed lives ; but let us find instead how dear and free a 
thing self-sacrifice may be, when it takes away our 
selfseeking, and brings us out in a life of uncalen- 
lating devotion to our Master’s name and cause. 
The truth is, my friends, that our human nature is 
made to go a great deal more heroically than some 
of us think; and our soldiers in the field, thank 
God, are just now making the discovery. O what 
worlds-full of great feeling are given us, if only we 
can die into the causes of the worlds! We make 
the soul a vastly more prosy affair than it is, im 
agining that self-privation will starve it into good- 
ness, and penances do the work of repentances. 
Why if the fires of patriotic impulse can help our 
sons and fathers in the field to rejoice in so great 


THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 413 


sacrifice for their country, what pain can there be 
to us in our painstakings, what loss in our losses, 
when the love of God and of his Son is truly kin- 
dled in us? 

Let us also note for another lesson, opposite to 
this, that the military discipline has as little direct 
concern to beget happiness, as it has to compel self 
abnegation. There is so great peace and sweetness 
of enjoyment, in the genuinely christian state and 
calling, that such as are highest and most advanced 
in it, are in danger of being too much occupied 
with what may be called the pious luxury of their 
experience. Probably they do not call it by that 
name themselves; but being consciously exalted 
above measure in it, they conceive their joy to be 
itself a kind of self-certifying oracle and witness in 
their hearts. They speak of it often, they magnify 
it over abundantly it may be, and fall into a strain 
of elysianizing; as if that were the unquestionable 
test of the highest and best way of life. Hence 
their great endeavor, the main object of their search, 
is to find how their delicious rhapsody began, and 
how others also may be wafted into it. If we 
call them soldiers, which perhaps they are in a sense, 
and if only fit occasion were given, would show 
themselves to be, still they are, so far and just now, 
soldiers not in armor, but lying on some sunny bank, 
and celebrating there, in free discourse, the pleasures, 
nay the peace, of their warfare; also in free chorals, 
the fervors and inspiring confidences of their cause. 

35* 


414 JHE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 


Probably they have it not in thought, just now, to 
be enduring hardness, or in fact that they are under 
any call of soldierhood. The elysian property of 
their feeling is just now their principal concern; 
and it may be a very considerable danger of their 
‘largely blessed, half ecstatic state, that they will 
run to dissipation in it, and die out by and by, into 
a state of dryness and exhaustion they will not like 
to confess. It is never altogether safe for such as 
we, to be simply happy, and that may be the rea- 
son why the best and solidest of us never are. See 
how it was with the great apostle, “fourteen years’ 
ago.” He was caught up into the third heaven, 
he knew not whither, and scarcely any better who 
he was—in the body or out of the body—thrilled 
of course with unwonted, unspeakable delights; but 
having been up among God’s roses, he came back. 
with a thorn! And that thorn, as we can see, was 
the life of him. Without it, pervaded all through 
with the perfume of his joy, he was no more any sol- 
dier at all, and scarcely a man. But having a Satan 
to buffet him inside in attacks on his infirmities, he 
began to glory and be glad in a more sublime fash- 
ion, having now the power of Christ resting con- 
sciously on him. That now was a grandly mortal 
style of joy; for there was a roughness or obstruct- 
ive element in it. He is not a soldier now, sunning 
himself at his ease on the bank of the river, but he 
is in his fighting trim, girded in high liberty for the 
onset commanded. We must not think, my brethren, 


THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 415 


that the crown or decisive test of our experience is 


that we are happy—a most pleasant thing it is if 
we are—but as certainly as our fight is not over, 


we must look for hardness to be endured, and woe 


be to us if we do not find it. 

There is yet one point of this military analogy, 
where in fact it is scarcely any proper analogy at 
all, but a kind of universal law, running through 
all kinds of mortal endeavor, secular, moral, mental, 
and spiritual; viz., that whatever we get, we must 
somehow fight for it. What begins in the conflicts 
of tribes and empires runs down through all kinds 
of experience. We have to fight the soil by labor, 
and conquer from it our bread. We get knowledge 
and mental discipline, by a long, unflinching, steady 
battle. We build by scoring timber, burning clay, 
and hewing rock. We build states by scoring con- 
stitutions, baking laws in the fires of opinion, and 
squaring down magistrates for their places by the 
eutting edges of our votes. And so we go fighting 
on through every thing, and most certainly of all, 
in religion. It is waging war, though it be for the 
Prince of Peace. Fighting a good fight, is the only 
way to finish the course, and the crown of glory 
comes in no where, save at the end. And so much 
impressed with this fact is our great and truly most 
heroic apostle, that he occupies a good part of one 
whole chapter in naming off and, as it were, show- 
ing how to put on, the whole armor of God—gir- 
dle, breast-plate, shoes, shield, helmet, and sword— 


416 THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 


and he even conceives that Christ is our captai 
leading us on. Then follows another apostle who, 
making his appeal to seven successively named 
churches, puts them to their task each one, by the 
promise, so many times repeated—“ To him that over- 
cometh,”—“ to him that overcometh.” And the 
passing up through, into worlds above the world, 
he beholds the victors coming in with palms inl 


their hands, and these, he cries aloud, “are they 
which come out of great tribulation ;” and of other 
victors if possible more highly ennobled —‘“ they 
loved not their lives unto the death.” And so, in 
one view, it is only battle we are waging here all 
the time. We open the gate of the kingdom by j 
great throes often, such as make us bleed. Our 
life is the battle in the cause of God, and God 
is going finally to emerge in the full honors of his 
own most proper and glorious title, Taz Lorp OF 
Hosts. 
To realize, my brethren, a conception so truly sub- 
lime is, I fear, not possible for some of us, living 
in our present key. We are, many of us, living 
daintily, I fear, and half theoretically. We have 
no persecutions, and we settle into very dainty notions — 
and habits. There is a want of rugged vigor and 
muscle in us. The ring of true metal is wanting. 
To please him that hath chosen us to be soldiers” 
is not so much our thought, as that he will somehow © 
find a way to please us. O that God would give” 
us back once more some heroes in godliness, such as 
: 

. 


THE MILITARY DISCIPLINE. 417 


lived in the old time now gone by. Or better, far 
| better, that he would gird us all to be total, and 
Metrone, and steadfast, in the cause of our Master— 
clear every one of entanglement; sturdy, and stiff, 
. and simple, and right; refusing all the softer methods 
of the self-enjoying harsh and having it as call- 
ing enough, to be in the complete war discipline, 
as well as the complete liberty, of eternal obedience 
t to God. 

fa In facing this Leg between the christian and 


‘of a matter that is even painful to ie Hae the 
: ease and question of desertion. By what state rea- 
sons and conditions of absolute necessity it is put 
| down as the greatest of all crimes, and punished 
|} with inevitable execution, we do not require to be in- 
| formed, and the heartrending and truly shocking 
' scenes that make up the after-breakfast horror of 
| the camps are alas! too familiar. The parallel I 
' will not trace. Are the religious state-reasons less 
decided ? the mischiefs of christian desertion less de- 
' moralizing? the grand necessity here less impera- 
| tive? Fellow soldiers and comrades, I can not look 
| down this gulf; for the bottom of it is I know not 
| where. But this I know; that, if you do not deny 
| Christ, he will not deny you, and that if you serve 
“him in such devotion as to make a cheerful and 
i glad service, you will never be stolen away from his 
a cause, by any most seductive bait of treason. 


».@.6 i 
THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 


“The throne of God and of the Lamb.”—Rev. 22: 1. 


Recarprye here the mere grammar of the words, 
we have a partnership deity presented. Though per- — 
haps the English version, speaking not of the throne 
of God and the Lamb simply, but of the throne of — 
God and of the Lamb, gives a more plural cast to the 
words than it need. However this may be, no diffi- - 
culty is created ; for since person, when applied as in 
grammar to God, is only a finite figure, derived from - 
our human personality, a plurality of persons may — 
represent him as truly as one, and perhaps even a 
great deal more truly, because more adequately. It” 
is indeed a fault of any single name, or symbol for © 
God, that it presents him too easily, in a too definitely — 
bounded figure. Nothing, in free use, will save his © 
dimensions, which does not leave us to behold him in : 
a maze, by that to be magnified. And if three per — 
sons, or more, are employed to create the maze, we 
have nothing to complain of, provided both the dimen- © 
sions and the personality are practically saved. . 

But the matter I have now in hand is not the plu- 
rality encountered, but the name; to do, in this really — 

(418) 


THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 419 


supreme article of the gospel story, what a late able 

writer has undertaken for the Progress of Doctrine in 

ne New Testament—showing how a lamb becomes the 

Lamb; avery humble common name, the highest of all 

_ proper names; climbing up through long reaches of his- 
tory, into the throne itself of God. I propose, in other 

words, to trace the ascending progress, scari in the final 
coronation, of the Lamb. 


The ascending stages of this progress we shall best 
- discover if we glance at the scripture record of the 
_ story. The word Jamé begins of course at the crea- 
_ ture, and the creature required, first of all, to be cre- 
ated, having just the qualities of innocence, inoffen- 
_ siveness, incapacity of resentment and ill-nature, 
i ready submissiveness to wrong, necessary to the in- 
tended meaning, and the finally sacred uses, of the 
' word. Lambs of nature were first-stage symbols. for 
the due unfolding of the Lamb of religion. 
_ Then follows, we may see, a process in which arti- 
ficial meanings are woven into and about the words 
and images provided, by the religious uses of sacrifice ; 
f for God is now to be displayed in the dear passivities 
a of sacrifice. Thus the sinning ma 


ple—wants a liturgy for his repentance, one that shall 
a ‘both move and express the tenderest contritions, the 
_ sweetest hopes and confidences of reconciliation. 
_ Spontaneously therefore, as some think, or more prob- 
_ably by a special appointment of God, he chooses this 
“most passive, most unsinning, unoffending creature, 


420 THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 


and says—“ Be this for me,” offering it in fire, as the 
appeal of his faith and his prayer of reconciliation. 
Used for ages in this manner, the lamb becomes a 
kind of sacred image, and the blood of the lamb an 
accepted symbol of reconciliation, or forgiving mercy. 

By and by, after many centuries have passed, Abra 
ham is put on acting a strange scene of sacrifice in 
the offering up of his son; wherein he is to be carried 
through incidents and a story and a struggle of loss, 
that will be the analagonj or type of another, still 
more mysterious sacrifice, where God provides another, 
holier lamb himself. And the story ends in fact in 
a strange, enigmatic, yet apparently forehinting utter- 
ance— God will provide himself a lamb ”—words 
that reached farther than he could even understand 
himself, to be sometime fulfilled in the offering of the 
cross, as the consummate fact of sacrifice. 

Next we come upon another more advanced stage 
in the process. For when the Lord is going through 
Egypt in judgment it is ordered, for the comfort of 
his people, that the blood of a lamb, now become a 
sacred element and type of God’s all-sparing mercy, 
shall be sprinkled on the lintel of their doors; behold- 
ing which the destroying angel shall pass by and 
spare. Hence that blood of the lamb is called the 
token of the Lord’s passover. And so the passover 
observance was continued for ages after, till it sub- 
sided, as being evangelically fulfilled in the Lamb of 
the cross, and the christian supper. And the Provi- 
dential correspondence of the two is curiously noted 


THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 421 


in the fact, that as no bone of the passover-lamb was 
allowed to be broken, so the cross should break no 
bone of its victim. 

Next we trace another stage of advance, in that 
strangest and, humanly speaking, most unaccountable 
of all scriptures, the Messianic picture of a mighty 
suffering some one, in the 52d and 53d chapters of 
Isaiah. The prophet has no name for him, breaking 
directly into his picture and saying, as for God—* Be- 
hold my servant,” able only to present the nameless 
great one by his own wondrous figure itself. If he is 
a mortal, there was never any such mortal conceived 
or heard of before. The unbelieving critics have 
never been able to make out the picture. What being 
is he, they have asked in vain, who, inverting all the 
ordinary modes of judgment, is “to sprinkle many 
nations,” and “be exalted and extolled and be very 
high,” and “see his seed and prolong his days;” be- 
cause he is ‘‘ brought as a lamb to the slaughter,” and 
“hath poured out his soul unto death ;” because “he 
has made intercession for the transgressors ;” because 
“he is despised and rejected of men,” “ wounded for 
our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities;” be- 
cause in short he is the lamb “on whom God has laid 
the iniquity of us all?’ There stands the picture on 
the page of prophecy—who shall ever be seen to an- 
swer it? Centuries come and go, but the lamb that 
is to be, struggles all this time in the womb of Provi- 
dence—expected and not seen, yet waiting always for 
the birth. 

36 


422, THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 


At last the fullness of time is come; when a strange 
new prophet appears, announcing the kingdom of 
God now at hand. And he breaks out suddenly at — 
his preaching and baptism by the Jordan, as a particu- 
lar unknown man is seen approaching to claim the — 
baptism, in the strangely worded salutation—“ Be- 
hold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the 
world.” Now at last the advances and preparations 
of so many ages are ended, the Lamb of God is come. 
Only what conceivable impulse, if not the direct im- 
pulse of the Spirit of God, could have opened the 
prophet’s mouth in this strangely-worded salutation ? 
And who is he that he should bear this appellation ? 
That will be known some three years hence more per- 
fectly. When this wonderful, only spotless being of 
the world, after having breathed purity and love on it 
for so long a time, goes to his cross in dumb submis- 
sion to his enemies, and dies there staining the fatal 
post with his blood, having yet no bone of his pass- 
over-body broken, we begin to catch some first inti- 
mation of the prophet’s meaning, when he declares— 
“he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter,” also of the 
New Testament prophet in his strange salutation— 
“ Behold the Lamb of God.” And then what does he 
himself do, three years after, when he encounters the 
two disciples going back, heavy-hearted, into the coun- 
try, but open to them all the ancient scripture, show- 
ing out of it how certainly Christ ought to suffer, and 
so to be the Lamb of prophecy. And what does he 
give them to see, in this manner, but that all sacri 


a. THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 423 


He 


- fice and passover are now fulfilled forever in his divine 
"passion 2 
Then, passing on a stage farther, we are completely 
certified and cleared in our impressions, by the discov- 
ery that, at this same Lamb and passover blood, all 
apostolic preaching begins. God’s new gospel of life 
is the revelation of the Lamb. For this, says Philip 
_ to the eunuch, is the prophet’s “lamb that was dumb 
before his shearers.” And this, says Peter, is “the 
precious blood of Christ as of a lamb without blemish 
and without spot.” And this again is Paul’s “ propi- 
tiation,” “ reconciliation,” Christ “made sin,” to bear it 
clean away, and in fact his whole book of Hebrews beside. 
: Then once more the progress of idea and doctrine 
_ that has been advancing stage by stage, from Abel’s 
| day of sacrifice onward, and is now published, far and 
wide, by its apostles as a gospel of salvation for man- 
: kind, culminates, in full discovery, at its true last 
_ point, in the scripture book that, for that reason, is 
called the Revelation of Jesus Christ. No matter 
whether these openings of heaven to John reveal 
scenes of worship literally transacted there, about the 
throne, or only visional images and machineries be- 
held above, that represent so many chapters of future 
world-history coming to pass below; no matter 
whether the last two chapters open the real paradise 
of God above, or only prefigure a regenerated moral 
paradise on earth. Still in all these visions, whether 
read in one way or the other, the Lamb of God is seen . 
to be now in the ascendant, receiving his divine hon- 


494 THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 


ors, surrounded representatively at least, and so fi 
truly, by innumerable hosts offering their homage 
wielding also, as in rule, a majestic and complet 
Providence that regulates the world’s affairs, an 
makes it now his kingdom. And the result appears 
at last in what may rightly be called the coronatio 
of the Lamb. Where, emerging from his subject, 
bleeding state, he ascends to his rightful dominion, 
and is entered into his glory. He now is God, as be 
fore he was the Lamb, and the more completely God, 
that he is God more gloriously known for the addition 
thus made. Three times over in a very short space 
the two words God and Lamb occur together, as if. to 
be henceforth forever joined in like ascriptions. 
First no other temple is wanted, “ for the Lord God 
Almighty and the Lamb are the temple thereof.” 
Secondly no other light is wanted ; for “the glory of 
God lightens it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.” 
And last of all, thirdly, ‘‘ the pure river of the water 
of life,” the river of universal healing, is seen “ pro- 
ceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.” 
At this point the sublime progression of the Lamb is 
ended, for it can go no farther. 

We behold him now enthroned everlastingly, at the 
summit of all order, majesty, dominion, truth and— 
worship; as truly God as God, and God more truly 
and sufficiently God, that his image is complete in the 
glorious addition of the Lamb. The grand acclaim 
and coronation hymn is lifted by multitudes and na- 
tions without number, and by the angels round about 


THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 425 


_ the throne—ten thousand times ten thousand and 
thousands of thousands—“ Worthy is the Lamb that 
_ was slain.” And the word goes under the earth, and, 
as it were telegraphically, under the sea, filling all 
masses and spaces of the creation—“ Blessing, and 
honor, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth 
upon the throne, and unto the Lamb forever and 
ever.” 

Of course it will not be understood when we trace, 
in this manner, the stages by which the Lamb ascends 
to his throne, that he is actually promoted to another 
grade of being. ‘The real exaltation is to be in us, or 
in the raising and filling out of our ideas. For the 
long-drawn, visibly predestinated progress we trace in 
the outward history, is a progress for our sake, and 
not a progress in God. And the object of it is, to 
_help our ascent towards the full and practically true 
conception of God—God as he has been forever, and 
will forever be. The real coronation, after all, is not 
complete till it is completed in us, in our thought, in 
our advanced apprehensions of God, as a character 
centralized, in some sense, in the sensibilities of his 
lambhood. This advance in our thought—this new 
God-sense, I go on accordingly to show, will contain, 
especially, these three very important factors. 

1. The received impression that God is a being mor- 
ally passible; capable, that is, of a suffering propor- 
tionate to his goodness. 

2. Also that his nature itself is relational constitu 
tionally to both sin and redemption. 

36* 


426 THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 


3. That he is most powerful, does his greatest and 
most difficult things, by his freeness to suffering. 


On these three points, I conceive, our thought is 
moving and to move. Taking the point first named, 
what does it signify, that God has now the Lamb — 
throned with him, but that He is now to be more and 
more distinctly conceived as a susceptible being; to 
be great, not as being absolute, or an infinite force, 
not as being impassive—a rock, a sea, a storm, a fire— 
but as having great sentiments, sympathies and sensi- 
bilities. Nothing has been so difficult for men as to 
think of God in this manner. The human soul is over- 
borne, at first and for long ages, by the statural di- 
mensions of God; filling up his idea with mere quan- 
tities ; putting omnipotence in the foreground, and 
making him a grand positivity of force; adding om- 
niscience, or absolutely intuitive knowledge, adding — 
also will, purpose, arbitrary predestination, supralap- — 
sarian decrees; exalting justice, not as right or recti- 
tude, but as the fearful attribute of redress, that backs 
up laws regarded mainly as rescripts of will in God, 
and not as principles. And just here, in fact, is the 
reason why the Lambhood nature of God was so late 
to be revealed, emerging, as it were, a completed fact, 
in the very last chapters of the Revelation. The 
dynamic notions of God had covered the, whole 
ground of his attributes, and there was no room, no 
capacity for any the least conception of him, as a 
being able to endure an enemy, and suffer even bur- 


Ks rc OC eR eee 


THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 427 


‘in his wonderful chapter of the Messiah Lamb just re 
ferred to—‘ Who hath believed our report, and to 
_whom is the arm of the Lord revealed ”—who, that 
| i, in this coarse age, can even take the sense of my 
story? Why it shows a tender plant wilting in a dry 
_ ground. There is no high look in him. He is nota 
green bay-tree, nor a fire, nor a storm. The story 
comes too soon for us, and what can we do but hide 
our faces from him? And even we in this late Anno 
| Monpr could not any better apprehend the matter of 
God’s passibility if it had not been inwoven or inter- 
threaded with external story, by the suffering Lamb. 
| Slowly and very gradually the sense of some such 
thing is taken. But I hardly dare guess how many 
| centuries longer it will take, for even our theologians 
to conceive God in the greatness of his feeling, and 
the depth of his sacrifice, without putting forward 
trains of argument that begin at his omnipotence, and 
all-sufficient absolutism, and the gross-bulk matter of 
his infinity. He has always been at work to mend 
this defect in us; protesting by his prophets, in the 
matter of his sensibilities, that he is “ hurt,” “ of- 
fended,” “weary,” “was grieved forty years,” that 
“in the affliction of his people he was afflicted, and 
_ bear and carry them all the days of old.” All this in 
words to little or no effect; but now he shows us in 
the Lamb, as the crowning fact of revelation, that he 
isa God in moral sensibility—able to suffer wrong, 
bear enemies, gentle himself to violence, reigning thus 


4 
e s of sorrow for his sake. So calls out the prophet 


428 THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 


in what is none the less a kingdom, that it is the kin; 
dom and patience of Jesus. All this we see, as di 
tinctly as we can see human feeling in a human per 
son; and still we do not actually see it, when y 
look on it with our eyes. A great part even of ou 
christian theologians do not believe that God is « 
way passible or can be. Only the human nature sui 
fers, they argue, that alone can feel the touch of a sor 
row. Furthermore if God is passible, what is left 
they ask, of his greatness? And yet moral greatness 
without great feeling, great moral passibility, is evel 
absurd ; for a, morally great and perfect being is, by 
supposition, a being in great sensibility; the mor 
easily wounded because of his sensibility. And what 
is compassion but a kind of passibility? What is 
long-suffering but a way of suffering? And 
loving of the unlovely, is there not a pain struggling 
also in that? Is not purity quick to be disgusted % 
tenderness to be wounded ? righteousness to be stirred 
with displeasure? Instead therefore of being sel 
aloof from suffering because of his moral greatness, 
God is in a liability of suffering just according to hi 
greatness. Physical suffering is of course excluded 
by the fact of his infinite sufficiency, but that is 
matter quite insignificant for him, compared with his 
moral suffering. 

Under such conceptions of God we of course ap 
proach the great matter of atonement, in a wholly dif 
ferent predisposition. We shall look for something 
that belongs to the Lamb, something in the nature of 


—— 


i ae 
i 


| 
(ia THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 429 


Mforing patience, and sorrow. If he prepares a new 
footing of forgiveness, it will not be by what he enters 
into the legal, or politically legal and dynamic factors 
of government. He will not square off the law and 
level up the dues of transgression under the law—but 
he will simply turn a crisis in feeling. The very 
problem is, in great part, to bring out the everlasting 
Lamb element in God’s nature, so that he may be the 
saving power of a new worship. A God who is 
‘mainly supreme will, or absolute force, having his 
greatness largely in his quantities, will really have no 
place for the Lamb as integral in his nature. He will 
therefore be conceived chiefly as the grand avenger, 
‘standing for the satisfaction of his justice, and re- 
quiring to have it taken even from the innocent, if it 
‘is to be released in the guilty. If he is to forgive, the 
law-score must be made up in the same manner, and 
the penal dues of the law exactly paid, the curse of it, 
‘without a peradventure, suffered. Which forgiveness, 
pledged and praised as free, is really no forgiveness, 
‘but is only a release passed under the squaring-up 
‘principle, and simply signifies that the books are made 


‘even, leaving nothing to forgive. No such freezing 


scheme of legality appears when the Lamb is con- 
ceived, as from within God’s nature, tenderly bearing 
his enemy, and so making good the proof that what- 
ever may be due to his polity, he is not hampered by 
it, but is able to forgive without pay. Even as I for- 
‘give my adversary or enemy, when I can make cost 
for him, and suffer bitter loss for his sake—unable to 


430 THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 


perfectly smooth the recoil of my nature from 
wrong, and make clean work of my forgiveness, save 
as by such cost endured, I am effectually propitiate 
towards him. So also we conceive the propitiation o 
God; for the Lamb is not other than God, outside of 
God, suffering before God, but he is with God mos 
internally, necessary to the very balance of his per- 
fections, even as he is with God in his throne. Wha 
we call grace, forgiveness, mercy, is not somethin 
elaborated after God is God, by transactional work be- 
fore him, but it is what belongs to his inmost nature 
set forth and revealed to us by the Lamb, in joint su- 
premacy. 


We come now to the second point above stated, as 
involved in the coronation of the Lamb; viz., the con- 
viction to be more and more distinctly felt, that God’s 
nature itself is relational to both sin and redemp- 
tion. Dealing only with dynamic factors in God’s na- 
ture, that is with what belongs to his mere stature 
and capacity, imposing doubts of sin are crowded on 
us. God, we say, being omnipotent, can prevent all 
sin; since then he does not, he ‘must prefer to have it 
—hence our convictions of blame are only illusions. 
Sin is misdirection therefore, circumstance, an evil 
planted in the seed, that is going to be good in the 
fruit. But our God, as we see in the Lamb, is not all 
force, he does more than to just swing the hammer of 
his will and purpose; he can suffer, he can bear the 
contradictions of evil, he can win a cause by triumph 


THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 431 


-a sorrow—could from eternity do it. For there 
stands i in the throne as it had been a Lamb slain from 
e foundation of the world; and this Lamb-creator 
Baa create in self- saciaatne patience, just as he re- 
‘deems in the same. Thus he wanted, for love’s sake, 
moral natures about him, and could even bear any 
thing to bring them out perfected in their true good 
and glory. Their sin—for sin they assuredly would— 
would hurt him all through; but he is one who, for 
so dear an object can bear to be disgusted, and dis- 
pleased, and burdened with sorrowing concern. 
Therefore sin could be, and we do it,as in God’s warm 
bosom that can so far let us sting its suffering benigni- 
ties. It is not the run of causes, not bad-going cir- 
cumstance, no flour of the gods which their millstone 
of necessity grinds. The Lamb could suffer it, and 
for it ; therefore it could be and is. As sin is relation- 
al to the Lamb afterward, so the Lamb was relational 
‘to sin beforehand. We are not going therefore to 
pitch our tent and stay in the desert of the All, where 
‘nothing answers to nothing, save as one kind of soph- 
ism answers to another, but we shall begin to have it 
as a discovery most dear, that so much of what is 
| greatest in God is relational to sin. Instead of doubt- 
‘ing so ingeniously whether sin is sin, we shall even 
“begin to look upon our Lamb, standing in the world’s 
throne, with his scars and blood-stains on him, and 
we shall find a grandly philosophic cheer in believing 
our sin, as we did not in denying it. 
Sometimes we begin to imagine that the sense of 


432 THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 


sin is likely, as things are just now going, to quite di 
out. No, the Lamb is in the throne, and it is impossi 
ble henceforth, that a God unrelational to sin, or 
Fate unbeneficently relational, should ever be accepte 
by the settled faith of the world. If our faith, as w 
have it, is not regularly progressive, the same is tru 
of many rivers running toward the sea ; they run 
backward in long circuits often, still they are even 
running towards it when running away from it, and 
are sure to reach it at last. Let us have no concern 
for this matter. We shall never get by the sense of 
sin, till the Lamb in the throne becomes a lost idea. 
Simply to think the supreme eminence there of the 
Lamb is to look on him we have pierced, and see him 
rising higher and yet higher, age upon age, and feel 
the arrows that were hid in his sorrows growing even 
more pungently sharp in our guilty sensibility. All 
the more resistless too will be the stabs of bad. 
conviction, that they are meant to be salutary, 
and are in fact the surgery of a faithful healing 
power. | 

We are also shown by this revelation of the Lamb 
in the throne, and shall more and more distinctly see, | 
that the nature of God is, in like manner, relational 
to redemption. The two points, in fact, go together 
and are verified by the same evidence. But while sin 
is not any work of God or of the Lamb, we are con- 
tinually calling Christ’s life and death his work, or his 
work of salvation. And we often put such operative 
force into the language, that one might think it a 


THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 433 


= perfunctory matter that we speak of—an under- 
g or enterprise accomplished. It is true, I admit, 

at the Scriptures speak of Christ’s engagement as a 
“work; he also himself calls it his work ; but it is only 
so far a work as it needs must be, to Festi out a char- 
‘acter and a feeling. It does not create the character 
or the feeling, it only gives them to us as they were in 
God before. He opened a way of forgiveness, as we 
often say, but the opening is to us and not to God. 
He was just as truly a forgiving God before. That is, 
it was in him and always before had been, to smooth 
out his heart in forgiveness to enemies, by making cost 
for them, and enduring them in the patience of sacri- 
fice. The bleeding Lamb was in his nature before he 
bled on Calvary. His very being and character were 
‘Telational to redemption, before they were related to 
our redemption. It is not for one moment to be im- 
-agined that Christ the Lamb has somehow softened 
God and made him better. He came down from God 
as the Lamb that was slain from the foundation of the 
world, and the gospel he gave us is called the ever- 
lasting gospel, because it has been everlastingly in 
God, and will everlastingly be. It does not simply 
“mean that God is able, and always had been, to put 
himself on terms of benevolence with us. He is on 
‘such terms originally, with all beings of all worlds, 
“and even with the animals. The free forgiveness of 
“sin implies a great deal more than any such well-mean- 
ing disposition. For in every moral nature most right- 
_-e0us, and partly because it is righteous, there is a cer- 


‘ 37 
; 


434 THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 


tain recoil from the bad, a certain moral anger th 
does not cease because he says the word “ forgive.’ 
Well-willing, or benevolence, signifies nothing in th 
matter; there must be sorrow, suffering, bleeding en- 
dured ; something that makes cost on the passive side 
of the nature. Then, and not till then, the true for- 
giveness comes; a blessed and clean reconciliation, 
thinking no more of just letting the culprit go, but re- 
joicing in the fact that it has gained a brother. And 
this is what we mean when we speak of propitiation. 
We mean that God’s nature is so far relational to re- 
demption, that his glorious passibilities are bleeding 
always into the bosom of evil. There is a fixed ne- 
cessity of blood, and he has the everlasting fountain 
of it in his Lambhood. So that condemnation for 
evil, or sin, is not a whit more sure to follow than for- 
giveness, sweetened by self-propitiation. | 


It was proposed to show, thirdly, that having thel 
Lamb now in the throne, it will be more and more 
clear to men’s thoughts that God’s most difficult and 
really most potent acts of administration are from the 
tenderly enduring capacity of his goodness, represent- 
ed by the Lamb. The richness and patience of his 
feeling nature, in one word his dispositions, are the 
all-dominating powers of his reign. What he is in 
the Lamb—determines what he is and does univer- 
sally. | 

Thus if you look in upon the stock-powers of his 
mind and character, you will be very soon convinced 


ir 
ry 


. 
THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 485 


that his dispositions are the first matter with him, just 
as they are with us. From them every thing pro- 
ceeds. The Lambhood of his dispositions will subor- 
dinate every other function. His counsel, wisdom, 
plans, cosmical order, purpose, will-force and creative 
fiat begin at his dispositions, and not his dispositions 
at them ; for what could they do in preparing disposi- 
tions that by supposition are not? Always, in all 
rational beings, the dispositions are first, and the act- 
ings afterward. The Lambhood nature therefore in 
God dominates all other nature in him beside. What 
we have been calling the dynamic factors of his 
being, which in fact the philosophers commonly take 
to be the whole of it, are only purveyors and execu- 
tive servitors to the dispositions. And all they do 
will be done to further the ends and fulfill the man- 
dates of the dispositions. So that, looking in upon 
the glorious realm of attributes and powers in God’s 
internal armory, we may not scruple to say, that even 
there the Government is on the shoulder of the Lamb. 
And if it be something for God to rule the world, it 
can not be less for the Lamb to bear like sway in God. 

A second illustration of the supreme potency of the 
Lamb, or of God as represented by his painstaking 
love and sacrifice, may be discovered in the fact that 
he is able to love the bad; that is to love directly 
across moral distinctions, and even in spite of all 
deserts of character. He can love the cruel, the blas- 
phemers of his name, the mean, the filthy, the dis- 
gusting. It is true that by his gracious help we our- 


436 THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 


selves can be raised up to the same high level with 
him in this prerogative of his Lambhood. But it is 
not the teaching or conceived honor of the world. 
Outside of the gospel, it is universally assumed that 
love is related to loveliness, and that loveliness is the 
qualifying base, or quickening cause of love, save that 
in what is called natural affection the love is purely 
instinctive and goes by necessity. But in proper vol 
untary love, what man or teacher of morality ever 
imagined the possibility of loving the bad, and even 
of loving them into love and the goodness of a new- 
born life? And is there any greater stretch of power 
conceivable than that? Let any mightiest soul 
of mankind, who is not in the way of sacrifice with 
Christ, try what he can do in loving the bad ? 

Observe again also that the Lamb assumes to go 
through souls with a lustral and transforming power, 
from his passion. . Therefore behold, behold the Lamb 
of God that taketh away the sin of the world. He 
undertakes, in this manner, by the quickening force 
of his cross, to beget them, as it were, anew, and be 
the new-creator of their life. All this by the depth 
of his feeling and the sovereignty, so to speak, of his 
sacrifice. And who is there that, without him, will 
undertake, in any such way, to new-character the 
race, or even a single man. What other power of 
gods or men can cope with such a problem? Doubt- 
less a man may be managed correctively, in a way of 
partial improvement, by his fellow man, but to be 
transformed regeneratively, and have the sin taken 


THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 437 


put of his fiber, who will do that? Yet in Christ 
‘s a godlike or rather lamblike sorrow, tender as the 
dews of the morning, and liquidly vital as they ; there 
is a bleeding out of God’s own sensibility on the rock 
‘no mortal persuasions could melt, which is his iney- 
itably dissolving baptism, and from out of this our re- 
pentances run clear, even as the brooks run out from 
their springs. And so, with a meaning how deep, how 
grandly triumphant, we chant our confession—“ For 
the blood of Christ cleanseth us from all sin.” 

And again it is a singular and mightily impressive 
demonstration for the Lamb, that he goes into causes, 
retributive causes, incorporated in the system of na- 
ture itself, and turns them off from their victims. 
; The grace does not stop at nature, as if here was a 
barrier impassable, but it undertakes boldly, instead, 
. to so far stop even the wages of sin itself. But it does 
not eall on the dynamic forces of God to intervene, 
and shake off by a fiat the retributive laws and 

causes that have fastened their grapple on the man, 
but it infuses gently into him or into his faith, that 
personal, supernatural, life-giving spirit, that will go 
through his disordered members, and touch, as it 
were solvently, all the secret bonds and propagative 
chains of causes by which he is held, and is otherwise 
so to be holden forever. It does not require force in 
such a case to break the chains of causes; any drop of 
the blood of the Lamb, any tenderest touch, that is, 
of God’s sorrowing life and feeling is enough. Why 
_the very joints of the rocks—did they not burst open 
37* 


438 THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 


when the blood of the Lamb fell on their faces? An 
whenever that Lamb-power gets entered into any 
bosom of transgression, what shall we see but that all th 
retributive laws of all the worlds, crowding in, can no 
longer hold him fast, or keep him back from his liberty. 

We make another very wide and very impressive 
stage of advance in our apprehensions of the essential 
supremacy of the Lamb, when we discover that our 
notions of the governmental order of the world, or 
what we call Providence, are becoming, and will here- 
after seem to be, more and more graciously mitigated. 
Having now the Lamb in the throne, we are to have 
no more a merely punitive and dry absolutism; our 
- Providence will be a true Lamb-Providence. I mean 
by this a complete world-government working in the 
interest, fulfilling the counsel, and dispensing even 
judgment, in the feeling of the Lamb. We shall re- 
member his word when he went up— All power is 


given unto me, in heaven and in earth. Go ye there- 
fore and teach all nations, and lo, I am with you al- 
ways.” We shall not look to see him bursting out in | 
retribution suddenly, and hurrying on his judgments, 
as many in their feeble panic have been wont to do, : 
but making gentle suit rather, and waiting as in 
pauses of sorrow. He will set all things civil and re- 
ligious working together for his great kingdom’s sake, 
asa being absolutely one in all; purifying churches, 
by their dissensions, truths defiled, by their corruptions, 
principles of order and liberty, by great conspiracies 
and public wars, learning and science, by the ravages 


THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 439 


- they muster of unbelief and presumption ; leading in 
and out thus the successive ages of history, to settle 
new problems and winnow clean away the chaff of 
society. His work is silent, and commonly shows no 
_ sign; the timepiece rnns without any click of sound 
—but yet it runs! And when some great world- 
crisis comes, in earthquake, or storm, or fire, we know 
that only a seal of the everlasting, seven-sealed book 
of Providence is going now to be opened for a new 
chapter, and that Christ hath prevailed to open the 
book himself. And we hear the four-and-twenty 
elders round about the throne erying—‘ worthy art 
thou to take the book and open the seals thereof, for 
thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy 
blood.” It is only redemption now that carries on the 
counsel of Providence, and opens the seals thereof. 
John’s book of Revelation becomes, in this manner, a 
book of Providence all through, celebrating, as the cri- 
ses arrive, all the overturnings of Christ’s advancing 
empire, with successive hymns and acclamations; 
chanting everywhere the Lamb, the Lamb, the Lamb 
that was slain; sometimes, when public wrong is incor- 
rigible and fierce, the wrath, and always the victory 
of the Lamb; closing off at the river that proceedeth 
out of the throne of God and the Lamb; and showing 
there installed and everlastingly established, a glorious 
and complete Lamb-Providence for the world. 

Once more and briefly, | must carry up my subject 
a stage higher, and show you the world of the glori- 
fied crystallizing and crystallized, in the all-dominat- 


440 THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 


ing sway of the Lamb. The everlasting, universal — 
kingdom reigns by him—“ Of whom the whole family 
in heaven and earth is named.” It is not in the dy- 
namics of God’s nature, the will, the counsel, the oper- 
ative work and purpose, that the kingdom is organ- 
ized, save as these are first organized under his blessed 
dispositions ; we nowise give the true account, till we 
say, “to make all men see what is the fellowship of 
the mystery, which, from the beginning of the world, 
hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus 
Christ.” There he is in the throne where he fitly be- 
longs—“ That at the name of Jesus every knee should 
bow—of things in heaven, and things in earth, and 
things under the earth. And that every tongue 
should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of 
God the Father.” Therefore, ‘‘ Blessing, and honor, 
and glory, and power, be with him that sitteth upon 
the throne, and unto the Lamb forever and ever.” 


There comes out now, my friends, in the closing of 
this great subject, a question which I have not so 
much as named, though it has all along been urgently 
propounding itself; viz., what of the deity of Christ? 
Is he the Lamb in the throne, or is he not? And if 
he is not, what of Christianity? For one, I really do 
not know. In this article of Lambhood, and the cor- 
onation state which reveals it, I behold the major part 
and supreme glory of deity; and without this major 
part I really do not see much in God to attract me. 
Ido not very much want a God whose endowments 


THE CORONATION OF THE LAMB. 441 


and quantities, such as human thought and philosophy 
muster, are the principal sum of his nature. But I 
want a God relational to my sin and my redemption, 
a God whose sensibilities and self-renouncing passibili: 
ties are the containing causes of his dispositions, and 
the determining causes, in that manner, of his charac- 
ter and counsel. Such is the God our scriptures offer 
us, and the story of the Lamb ended off by the 
crowning of the Lamb, is really the dearest and grand- 
est of all the divine evidences; and when we distin- 
guish this most tender and sufficiently authorized 
pledge of forgiveness in the throne, where God, as 
being the Lamb, hangs out his flag of sorrow, calling 
us back, we shall want, I think, no other evidence of 
his deity than what we have in our feeling. 


a fe ip 


OUR RELATIONS TO CHRIST IN THE FUTURE 
LIFE. 


“ And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the 
Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, 
that God may be all in all.”.—1 Cor. 15: 28. 

Tuat Christ is to be in some sense eternal, and the 
eternal joy of all believers, we can not willingly 
doubt. Or if any one may turn this rather singularly 
marked passage of scripture, in a way to make it sig- 
nify his beingysometime merged in God, so as to be no 
longer discoverable, whether in his person, or in his 
kingdom, we may easily set the declaration of Christ 
himself over against it—‘‘ And if I go and prepare a 
place for you, I will come again and receive you unto 
myself, that where I am there ye may be also.” A 
full hundred other passages equally explicit might be 
added from the gospels and the epistles, all affirming 
it as a principal distinction of the heavenly felicity, 
that Christ is eternally present in it, giving recogni- 
tions of his friendship, and permitting free approach 
to his person. A very great part of them indeed 
are also from Paul, and it is nowise probable that 
what he says in one is to contradict and overturn all 
he teaches in the others. There is no way then, 
as we may see at a glance, but to seek some interme- 

(442) 


fw 


OUR RELATIONS TO CHRIST, ETC. 448 


diate and modified construction of this one passage, 
that will accommodate the faith declared in so many 
others, of a future felicity, constituted by the presence 
of Christ with and among his people. In doing which 
we raise the yery important, and, to all right living in 
the gospel hope, grandly practical question,— 

What kind of personal relation to Christ we are to hope 
for and hold, as our authorized and fixed expectation, for 
the future life ? 

I confess that I undertake this question partly for 
my own sake, hoping to be drawn by the deliberate 
treatment of it, towards conceptions more satisfactory 
and determinate. And if it should happen that this 
is the last sermon I am permitted to give, it will not 
be amiss that, for once, I have preached to myself. It 
may be too that others, who are waiting for the veil to 
be lifted, want the same kind of help that I thus con- 
fessedly seek on my own account. 


Among those who hold the Trinity more lightly, or 
in a more nearly Sabellian way, as a dramatizing of 
God to serve the occasional uses of redemption, it is 
common to assume the discontinuance of it, when the 
uses of redemption no longer require it. Having com- 
pleted the subjugation of evil, the Son is now to be 
subject himself, that God, who has put all things un- 
der him, may fe all in all. God is thus reduced back 
to his complete normal unity. Trinity is gone, and 
the absolute One, the strictly Unitarian God, has the 
whole field to himself. 


444 OUR RELATIONS TO CHRIST 


But there is a fatal want of depth in this concep- 
tion. If there was a necessity of the Three to carry 
on the redemption of the world, as this partly Sabel- 
lian view supposes, it was not -a necessity of sin, but 
of mind—finite mind, all finite mind ; existing there- 
fore ab ceterno in eternum. Besides a further account 
of the matter is possible, showing that God’s person- 
ality, and also his practical infinity are no otherwise 
maintainable, than by means of trinity. An imper- 
sonal God, such as pantheism offers, is a merely Infin- 
ite Thing, in which all our religious instincts are 
mocked ; finding no attribute of rationality, or love, or 
moral consciousness, that permits dependence, or even 
the sense of a personal relation. We must therefore 
have, we say, a personal God; and we make issue for 
God under that word. He is either personal, we feel, 
or else he is naught. 

And yet God is not a person—we are obliged to 
deny what we affirm in the word. He is only a person 
in the sense that he is a rock, or a sun, orasea. He 
is not a literal rock, sun, sea, but only these in a figure. 
So he is no literal person, but an infinite substance, 
shadowed to our feeling in such qualities as belong to 
person, borrowing this finite figure from ourselves. If 
we understand ourselves, we only mean by the word, 
that his incomprehensible nature is such as to permit 
us a practically social relation. After all, his person- 
ality is best affirmed, only when he is represented as 
three persons. For if we call him one person, as in 
the supposed better philosophy of the Unitarian teach- 


IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 445 


ing, using and reiterating always that finite person- 
figure, it results in a gradual and inevitable sinking of 
God’s magnitudes, till he falls into place in the pro- 
nouns of our grammar, as being virtually one of our- 
selves—working in our humanly personal methods of 
conjecture, computation, inference, reasoning by 
words, thinking one thought after another, willing in 
new determinations, We try to save ourselves from 
this collapse in idea, by adding on the epithet infinite, 
as a magnifier; and it is as if God were only aman 
written large, without any thing added for enlarge- 
ment; for if we call him an infinite person, the noun, 
person, is the only part of our designation that has 
any positive meaning, and the adjective, infinite, is 
merely a negative of boundary that indicates our 
purpose of enlargement, while adding nothing, as re- 
gards the divine quantities, to accomplish it. And just 
here we discover the real merit and value of trinity, 
in that it saves the just dimensions of God’s attributes, 
without making an impersonal platitude of his infini- 
ty. As the grammatic one person for God is a finite 
figure, so are each of the three. They are, therefore, 
neither one nor three, a completely exact notation for 
God ; but the three, when taken all together, do com- 
pose a large approximation, the best that human lan- 
guage permits. Set in personal relativity with each 
other and with us, they preserve and keep always in 
sight, the personal quality, or function; creating, at 
the same time, a maze for the mind, by the indefinable 
cross-relations of three persons, such as practically in- 
38 


446 OUR RELATIONS TO CHRIST 


finite the conception of God’s nature; which they de 
by raising a pitch of mystery that prevents any men- 
tal collapse into the always diminishing effect of a 
single person. 

We help ourselves in the conceiving of space in a 
way strongly analogous. We call it infinite space, well 
knowing that we are weak on the adjective. We 
then take up three lines of direction, length, breadth, 
and height, and running them out till we are obliged 
to stop—for we can not make them more than finite— 
we give them as our notations of infinite space. And 
yet the lines are not space at all, they are only instru- 
mentations by which we conceive it. In much the 
same way, we conceive the infinite personality of God, 
by three persons, all grammatically finite. They are 
- instrumentations inherently necessary to all finite 
mind, and, being necessary, God can never be thought 
of in any world without them, so as to save the full effect 
of his personality, and the proximately full impression 
of his greatness. They are just as necessary for the 
due conceiving of God, as the three lines were just 
now seen to be for the conceiving of space. 

If now it should occur to some one that our trinity is 
grounded thus in ourselves—that is in our finite want 
—and belongs in no sense possibly to God ; and if it 
should be demanded, since three finite persons, or 
images of such, are wanted to preserve the magnitudes 
» of God, why not six, or sixty ? it may fairly be answered ; 
first, that too great a number would produce distrac- 
tion, landing us in all the vices and weaknesses of poly- 


IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 447 


theism. Probably three persons come about as near 
producing distraction as it may be advisable to go; 
creating a maze that, being carried farther, might 
fatally unsettle the composure of our faith. Six lines 
of direction, or sixty, might do something to help out 
our conception of space, but the three just named will 
do more. But, secondly and more decisively, it may 
be answered, that there are reasons, or distinctions in 
God’s own nature, as thought by us, answering exactly - 
to our necessity as finite beings, which fix the number 
three to be the number of the persons. Thus, as we 
just now found three lines of direction, which may be 
called the categories of space, so there are three prin- 
cipal categories in the nature of God, which take up 
or contain, as far as finite thought is concerned, all 
that he is. Thus we may think God as the All-Fa- 
ther, the Original Base or Fontal Source, out .of whom 
all things proceed and at whom all beginnings begin ; 
also as the Word or Expression Principle, the All- 
Beautiful and ideally Perfect Form of God’s Intelli- 
gence and Holiness—which Word is Son, as being the 
perpetually born image of the Father, when he thinks 
himself, and bodies himself to us—also as the Perva- 
sive Spirit or Going-Through Principle, by which God 
moyes and sovereignly Imbreathes in us and things— 
the Everlasting Waft of Deity. So we have, in these 
three categories, the composite material of God ex- 
haustively conceived, as Father, Son and Holy Ghost. 
Nothing more can be added, which they will not take 
in. And these three categories we represent as per- 


448 OUR RELATIONS TO CHRIST 


sons. Which three are persons only in some undefina- 
ble way that puts them in practical relationship with 
us. They donot move transitionally in space. They 


neither forget nor remember but always absolutely 


know. They have no new thoughts and no personal 


development. They do not plan among facts, but in — 


the everlasting possibilities back of facts. And yet 
they are so related to our moral and social nature, that 
we can be sure of an approach and an experimental 
realization. We call them persons, not knowing ex- 
actly what we affirm, and yet none the less confident 
that we are affirming what is somehow related to our 
inmost social life. Our image is imperfect, but it is as 
good as the grammar of human speech allows. Or if 
some one should suggest that for anght that appears 
our personal pronoun they, covering confessedly person- 
alities we can not definitely conceive, but can only 
play into our socially religious nature, may after all be 
only neuter plurals, plurals of 2, such as grammar en- 
dows with imputed personality when in fact they have 
none, it must be enough to answer, that by setting 
them,—the persons—in trinity, as one that is three 
and three that are one, we affirm a cross-identity and 
coalescence that is not possible of any three things 
and can be only of persons. And in this view it is 
the particular merit of trinity, and is forever to be, 
that, as finite persons, we can steadily hold the person- 
ality of God, without reducing him at all to our meas- 
ures; as we certainly should, if we thought him al 
ways as a single person. 


IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 449 


We have now a great first point established; viz., ~ 
that when the Son is spoken of as finally to be made 
subject, or so far discontinued as to let God be all in 
all, it can not be meant that the Son is to be taken 
away, or disappear, in any sense that modifies at all 
the fact of trinity. If God is to be all in all, it must ° 
be as trinity and not otherwise. 

In adopting this conclusion I am properly required 
to make answer to an objection that may be 
raised ; viz., that when the everlasting need and fact 


_ of trinity are thus asserted, there ought to be an ap- 


pearance of trinity in the Old Testament, which is not 
there affirmed. Expositions are to be given hereafter 
from the Old Testament for a different purpose that 
will sufficiently answer this; I need only observe 
therefore here, that while the trinity is not formulized 
in the Old as it is in the New Testament, the material 
of it is all there, as visibly as if it were set forth in the 
New Testament formula itself. Furthermore, I will 
first add, what is even a curiously forward evidence, 
that Trinity breaks, in fact,on discovery, in the very 
first chapter of Genesis; and that too in a way the 
more striking, that there appears to be no thought or 
intellectual consciousness of the fact. Making nothing 
of the fact that the very name God [Elohim] is plural, 
for we do not know what causes back of the word 
gave it the plural form, we have first the Fontal God, 
the Father, the God in first beginning “ creating the 
heavens and the earth.” Then we have the Move- 
ment or Waft-Power, the Spirit moving ‘‘upon the 
38* 


450 OUR RELATIONS TO CHRIST 


face of the waters,” to beget form and order in the 
formless. ‘And finally, coming to the creation of 
man, we have a deliberation that for some reason in- 
dicates, in figure, at least, a plural consciousness, say- 
ing, “ Let us make man in our image and likeness.” 
In which words “image and likeness” reference is 
had to the Everlasting Son who is the God-Moral 
humanly conceived, the image and type of all God is, 
in his possibilities of Beauty and Character. Finding 
trinity thus in the very first chapter of Revelation, we 
can not be required to look farther. 

Going forward then into the future life, bo much ap- 
pears to be determined ; that we shall there know God 
unalterably and forever as trinity—Father, Son, and 
Holy Ghost. The Son therefore, as discovered in 
trinity, is of course never to be merged, or passed out 
of sight, or in such a sense made subject. How then 
shall we understand the apostle when he testifies that 
the “Son” shall be subject or retired from the view ? 
He is speaking plainly of the Son as incarnate, or ex- 
ternalized in the flesh, visible outwardly in the man- 
form and known as the Son of Mary. He it is that, 
after having—as a king outwardly regnant,—put all 
things under his feet, is in turn to become subject also 
himself, that God may be all in all, and the machin- 
eries hitherto conspicuous be forever taken back as 
before the advent. 

The only objection I perceive to this construction is, 
that the word Son here appears to be used in connec- 
tion with the word Father—“ delivered up the king- 


ee ,CUh;, CCT 


IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 451 


dom to God even the Father,’—“ then shall the Son 
”_as if it were intended to say that the Son as in 
_ trinity is to give place to the Father as in trinity, and 
he to be henceforth sole deity. But there is a two-fold 
_ relationship of Father and Son appearing and reap- 
pearing constantly; viz., that of the Father to the 
_ incarnate Son and that of the Father to the pre-incar- 
nate Son; that which gives him earthly Fatherhood 
and that which gives him celestial, ante-mundane Fa- 
_ therhood. The apostle was not careful here to puta 
guard for the saving of the eternal Sonship, because 
he did not imagine the need of saving that, any more 
than of saving deity itself. He was only thinking of 
the mortal Sonship, and giving us to see the essentially 
temporal date of its continuance. 

Trinity then as he conceives will remain, but the 
mortal Sonship, the man, will disappear and be no 
more visible. And let us not too hastily recoil from 
this. It may be that we have been promising our- 
selves a felicity in the future world, made up almost 
wholly of the fact, that we shall be with Christ in his 
humanly personal form, and have used this hope to 
feed our longings, quite apart from all higher relations 
to his Eternal Sonship. There are multitudes who 
mean to be, and really think they are, supereminently 
Christian people, whose piety is but a kind of caressing 
of themselves before Jesus the man, or a canting or 
caressing repetition they practice on his name. Their 
word is Jesus, always Jesus, never the Christ ; and if 
they can see Jesus in the world to come, they do not 


452 OUR RELATIONS TO CHRIST 


specially look for any thing more. Heaven is fully 
made up, to their low type of expectation, if they can 
but apprehend the man and be with him. Some- 
times it is not difficult to see that the piousness 
enjoyed in their cantillation of the name Jesus is 
really idol worship. It is hardly necessary to say that 
in such a use of the ever dear name, they put a vir- 
tual fraud on the gospel. The gospel hangs, for all its 
operative value and spiritual consequence to the 
world, on the fact that Jesus is the Christ, the man- 
form used as vehicle for the eternal Word and Lord. 
Religion reaches after God, and God is Trinity, and 
all the gospel does, or can do, by the name and human 
person of Jesus, is to bring us in and up to a God, 
who is eternally above that name. 

Our relations to Christ, then, in the future life, are 
to be relations to God in Christ, and never to the 
Jesus in Christ. They center in the triune deity, and 
specially in the Eternal Word or Son, who is repre- 
sented more specially, for a time, in the person of 
Jesus. But when that which is perfect is come; that 
which is in part will be taken away. Christ will re- 
main, because the Eternal Son is in him, but the 
Jesus, the human part, will be made subject, or taken 
away, because all that he could do for us in the reve- 
lation of God is done. j 

There is, I know, a much less questionable concep- 
tion of our gospel which has its blessedness in Jesus, 
because it meets God in him, and is specially drawn 
to his humanity, because it, even finds the fullness of 


Oe ~ a ee 


IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 453 


God bowed low in his person. This so far is genuine 
gospel. And it would not be strange, if a disciple 
thus wonted in God, should imagine that the joy of 

his faith is conditioned forever, by the human person 
at whose ministry or from whose love it began. What 
then is the future glory, he will ask, if it does not 
bring him in, where he can see the very man of the 
cross? ‘All my expectation stretches hitherward,’ 

he may say—fabulating visit and vision to express his 
grief— ‘I cross over to be with him, I press in eagerly 
to behold him, but I can not find him. I grope along 
the dusky streets of gold, asking where the Son of 
Man is to be seen, and they tell me that he is made 
subject, and is no more to be visible. Whereupon I 
sit down bafiled, and sick, and even spilling some sad 
tears on the pavement; groaning inwardly that my 
heaven turns out to be a poor illusion, a confidence of 
beholding the man, who yet in fact is nowhere. 
Dreary and forever dry world this, where the chief 
among ten thousand, he in whom I learned to seek all 
good and find all dearest peace, is gone out forever 
and lost!’ Ah! but you shortly catch a note that is 
music indeed, a strain that has been a long time 
wonted in your heart—‘ Worthy is the Lamb,”— 
“The Lamb that was slain,’—“for thou hast re- 
deemed us to God by thy blood.” And who is this 
but him that you seek? Surely he is somehow here, 
and this is somehow he. You missed him, perchance, 
because you were lodking too low down, out of the range 
of deity, to find him; whereas now you find him throned 


454 OUR RELATIONS TO CHRIST 


in God, hymned in God, as the everlasting Son of the 
Father—and yet he is somehow Son of Mary still, 
even as he is the Lamb that was slain. Whereupon, 
as you think farther, you begin to see, that the hu- 
manly mortal, the humble and poor Christ, dusted 
with sore foot-travel, as on his way up from Galilee, 
is in fact the everlasting Son, as in Trinity, and took 
his mortal guise only for a day, that he might prove 
his gentle condescensions and draw us in the level of 
brotherhood. And then, ascending to the Father and 
the glory that he had with him before the world was, 
you have it as your liberty to possess him still as char- 
actered in his mortality, to hail him as the Lamb, or 
behold him as the mortal brother, and see in fact the 
whole Christ-feeling in him, such as he was to you 
when he was with you below. 

Our conclusion then is that the pre-inearnate Son of 
the Father is the incarnate Son of Man; the same 
that was made flesh and dwelt with men, bore his 
mortal poverty, wept his mortal tears, and died, for 
men, to be the propitiation for their sins. Only he is 
now made subject ; which means that he returns into 
God where he belongs and is duly glorified. How 
else should it be with him? Of course he would not 
stay incarnate forever. He is not here as being mort- 
gaged forever to humiliation. He came into his mor 
tal work that he might be made subject when his 
work is done; which being made subject only means 
that he is entered back into God and the ascendancy 
that belongs to Him as the all in all. And lest he 


IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 455 


should seem in this reéxaltation to be lifted quite 
above us, and lest we should seem to have lost the 
lowly one we learned to love so tenderly, and now re- 
member as having been so nearly evened with him in 
his lot, how grandly will it comfort us to know that he . 
is now, and is forever to be just what he was histor- 
ically ; that as he was the Lamb of God, so now he is 
all that in the throne; that as being in the form of 
God he took the form of a servant, so now he isa 
seryant in the form of God; bowing all his honors 
sweetly down to let us see our Christ centered ever- 
lastingly in Trinity itself. Back there under that veil 
is the Son of Mary, the Child of her Manger, 
the Healer that came about on foot, and slept uncoy- 
ered by the roads and on the mountains, he that was 
bowed to suffering, he that could be hated and die— 
all this he is above, as charactered for us by what he 
was here below; nowise exalted above it, but rather 
by it, forever. Gone by as the Jesus, also as the 
Christ under time, he is yet the Eternal Son forever 
Christed by his mortal story ; so that we behold him 
eternized as our Christ, and hear him saying as it 
were out of his humanity— I am Alpha and Omega, 
the beginning and the ending which is and which was 
and which is to come.” It is as if the Christ we loved 
were visible in all his dear humanities, though Trinity 
alone is left. 


At this point we reach what may be called the out- 
line conception of the subject. But to make it more 


456 OUR RELATIONS TO CHRIST 


clear, and settle the relation of it more definitely to 
certain current ideas, I undertake to controvert and 
correct our current ideas in two particular points, 
where they seem to obstruct any such conception of 
the view already stated, and forbid us to rest in it, as 
one of the finalities, or true Last Things. 

1. We have it as a commonly accepted article of 
doctrine, that the incarnate person includes a human 
soul, and by this human soul, contriving what is to 
become of it, all our perplexities in the question of 
our future relations to Christ are created. That, as 
being incarnate, he has “two natures and one per- 
son,” is agreed by us all; but when we come to an- 
alyze the human-nature part, as the teachers began to 
do some centuries later, finding it composed of “a true 
body and a reasonable soul ”—that is of a proper hu- 
man body and a proper human soul or spirit—there is 
more room for doubt. Ido not here deny that there 
was a proper man-soul involved in the incarnation, or 
incarnate person—I carefully abstain from doing it— 
but I do most peremptorily deny that any one can 
show it. Doubtless there are inferences enough that 
may be drawn to make it a most logically irrefragable 
conclusion. Is he not distinctly called a man many 
times over? and what is a man without asoul? He 
also prays, he acquires knowledge, he moves about in — 
space as omnipresence does not, he suffers and by suf- 
fering is made perfect, and, to sum up all, he makes 
advances mentally in the ways of a strictly human de- 
velopment—represented therefore as growing in wis- 


IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 457 


dom and character, like all other human children— 
_ what then is left us but the conclusion, as by neces- 
sary logic, that he had a proper human soul included 
in his person? Accordingly we have, I know not how 
many sermons showing the complete humanity from 
the complete and distinctly observable human develop 
ment. The argument goes to the mark easily, and 
we really suppose that every thing is established. 
But the moment we cross over to the other shore the 
tebles are turned, and we find that about the toughest 
matter we have there on hand is, to find where the 
man-soul of Jesus is to go, and what is to become of 
it. We began before we crossed over, to observe that 
our “ two natures and one person” had been running 
us into two natures making two persons, and we also 
had some twinges of suspicion that our very exposi- 
tion of the development assumed the fact, not of a 
finite human nature only, but of a finite human per- 
son to be thus developed; for a mere human nature, 
observe, included under the “ one person” of the first 
orthodoxy, and dominated by the supreme con- 
sciousness of that one person, will signify as little to 
itself, as any floating speck does in the tide-swing of 
the sea; and then what liberty is there as a condition 
of development? Accordingly now, in its second-life 
state, this man-soul becomes a most unreducible, non- 
deseript being that allows no classification. 

First, that the eternal Son of God, having his place 
in God as trinity, is to be duplicated forever in a Son- 
ship out of trinity, we can not imagine; for what 

39 


458 OUR RELATIONS.TO CHRIST 


then is to become of this second outside Sonship ? 
Next we can not more easily imagine that, as being 
the Eternal Son, he has taken up the man-soul of 
the incarnation to be forever component in his divine 
nature ; for in that case, from and after the incarna- 
tion, God would be a different substance, a conception 
wholly inadmissible—no such codicil to the divine 
nature belongs to the New Testament. What then 
next if the man-soul, taken up, be disengaged from 
the incarnate person and become a proper man, a 
Jesus visible forever by himself? If so there is cer- 
tainly no very special felicity to come of being with him. 
After all we have said of his development, he can 
have no specially supereminent character. He has 
lived in shadow all his thirty years, under the all- 
swaying will of the one superdominant person. He has 
not done a work, or thought a thought, or loved, or 
willed, or suffered, or conquered a temptation, on his 
own account, in the right of his own free agency. 
Had he been chloroformed and laid by these thirty- 
three years, he would be as far on in all that consti- 
tutes character. 

We go back now from this excursion across tlie 
river, and reéxamine our argument for the man-soul 
from its supposed development. And here we dis- 
cover that our logical inferences were all at fault, in 
the fact that the incarnate person is an abnormal per- 
son, and for aught that appears, wholly out of range, 
for any sort of argument we are master of. We 
might as well reason out the fire of the burning bush 


oe oe 


IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 459 


by the inference that it can not be fire, because it does 
not burn; or the wine of Cana by showing that, hav- 
ing come out of the water, it must have been in the 
water before. All arguments in the categories of the 
ordinary are but idle play, when applied thus to the 
extraordinary. The facts of the development do in- 
deed prove development in some sense; but the real 
question still is left—whether the incarnate Son of 
God himself was not that soul or nature that was de- 
veloped ? That he became the germ, the born infant, 
the child, the boy, the youth, the man, and finally 
the ascended and glorified Son of the Father, pass- 
ing on gradatim, and up through, taking and making 
all the history himself is not a whit more difficult than 
the fact of incarnation itself—infinite in finite. And do 
not the scriptures very nearly assert this conception ? 
As when they declare—“ And the Word was made 
flesb,” we understand them to say that the Word it- 
self became the ensouling principle, the man of the 
incarnate person. So when Christ calls himself the 
bread that came down from heaven, adding—“ the 
bread that I will give him is my flesh, which I will 
give for the life of the world,” he is evidently think- 
ing only of his own divinely conscious person, and the 
body by which he gets connection with the world. 
Nothing is farther off than to imagine that he is 
thinking here of a man-soul lurking under the flesh’ 
that is not it, nor himself. Again also, when the 
apostle says— For since by man came death, by man 
came also the resurrection of the dead ;” he does not 


460 OUR RELATIONS TO CHRIST 


mean of course that a certain human soul or nature 
in Christ raises the dead, but that he himself in his 
divine order and life does it—he is the man. So — 
again when he says—‘‘ For as by one man’s disobe- 
dience many were made sinners, so by the obedience 
of one, [i. e., one man,] many were made righteous,” — 
he has no thought of saying that the obedience of the _ 
man-soul person was able to impart righteousness, but 
only that the incarnate Lord is able, as being himself 
the man. And yet again, once more, he tells exactly 
who this man, so potently working is—“the second 
man is the Lord from heaven.” In which he comes 
as near saying that the man of the incarnate person is 
the Lord himself, as he well could. All these declara: 
tions I cite, not to prove that there is no human soul 
in the person of Christ, but to show how little ac 
countable the scriptures are for the common assump 
tion made of it. It is an incumbrance that we reason 
out for ourselves, by inferences from facts totally ab- 
normal; an elephant that we capture, and after that 
can no way find what to do with it. 

It further remains to say, as regards the particular 
matter now in hand, that the scriptures give us, in the 
positive, conceptions of God as related to man, and 
of man as related to God, such as very nearly su- 
persede all these difficulties respecting Christ here- 
after, and open a fair possibility of being practically 
with him as subsisting in trinity. Thus, if we take 
what is said, several times over, of our being 
made in the image of God, and of Christ being 


IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 46] 


incarnate in the same, an inference runs backward, 
as we may see, that God is in our image, and also in 
Christ’s image, and Christ and we in the same image; 
whence-also it follows that, before creation and before 
incarnation, God himself was somehow, or in some 
sense, Man. He had, that is, an anthropoidal nature, 
which anthropoidal nature is a kind of Divine Man- 
Form or Word, by which he thinks himself, incarnates 
himself, and types himself in his creations. And thus 
it is that the Jehovah angel, and all the mysterious 
visitors called angels, take the man-form in their ap- 
pearing, whether in fact physically bodied or not. 
Thus Daniel saw in vision a celestial Son of Man 
not incarnate—“ behold one like the Son of Man 
came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the An- 
cient of days,” [the Father] and had given him, as he 
came near, “dominion and glory, and a kingdom.” 
Again he represents Nebuchadnezzar as looking down 
into the fiery furnace, where he had cast the three bold 
confessors, and crying out in astonishment, “ Lo, I see 
four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and 
the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.” And 
this same notion of the Son of God as being in the 
form of God, and so a Man, travels down, we see, 
through the New Testament—“ Who being in the 
form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with 
God. But made himself of no reputation, and took 
upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the 
likeness of men.” 

Now in this brief retrospect of the scripture ideas 

39* 


462 OUR RELATIONS TO CHRIST 


and methods, we discover, as plainly as need be, that 
when the Son was to be incarnate, it was not neces- 
- sary for him to take up a tiny man-soul, not before ex- 
isting, always to be unused and without character of 
its own—humanity was in the type of his own ever- 
lasting person before. He must needs begin his in- 
carnation at the germ state of our nature; for he 
could not otherwise be incarnate as in history; he 
would only break in casually, as an apparition or 
epiphany, to break out again when he pleases and be 
gone. But he wanted to be integral in the race, and 
live himself into record with us, even as Aristides, 
or Socrates, or Antoninus. So he took the germ-life 
and its tiny possibilities just as all men do, and in 
that life, as if limited in a sense by age, and size, and 
experience, he expected to grow, or unfold gradatim 
into all the stages of wisdom, and power, and pro- 
gressive manhood. “ For though he were a Son [Son of 
God] yet learned he obedience by the things which 
he suffered, and being made perfect—graduated into 
full divinity—he became the author of eternal salva: 
tion unto all them that obey him.” We are not inside 
- of this development, we can not reason it, or imagine 
it, for it is abnormal. We only conceive that the Son of 
God himself is the subject of it, and that we have no 
more reason to suppose a man-soul joined with him in 
it, and possibly eternized in him after he has passed 
the grade of a man’s development, than we have to 
suppose the germ-life, the infancy, the child, the boy, 


IN THE FUTURE LIFE, 463 


the young man eternized, when the advances made 
in years leave them behind. 

Our being then with Christ in the future life, begins 
at being with the Son of God in trinity. Nay it both 
begins and ends with that; forif, in our miseducated 
ways of thought, we seem about to miss, in that man- 
ner, being at all with the personal manhood, in whose 
conscious friendship it was our hope to be joined, we 
discover the Man, even the God-Man everlastingly 
present, integrally present, in trinity before either we 
or the world began to be. Furthermore we may also. 
discover that the matter which most distinguishes the 
fact of his reascension to the Father, is not that he 
is gone up as a human-nature soul to be glorified, and 
to set us in the faith of an everlasting companionship 
with him, but that being himself the Eternal Man 
brought low, he has gone up to be glorified again, as 
he prayed himself—‘ And now, O Father, glorify 
thou me, with thine own self, with the glory that I had 
with thee before the world was.” And what hope cap 
be as inspiring and reassuring to us as that Christ has 
gone up thus to be the Son of God, and has lost 
nothing, left nothing behind, because. of his humilia- 
tions. We must not ask to have the story end off in. 
dejection, and to see the man sit weeping still and 
forever in his sorrows. We want exactly what is 
given us to see, the due enthronement of his sacrifice, 
showing him exalted forever to the throne of God 
and of the Lamb. Only in that word Lamb, regal as 
it is now become, there is a flavor of tenderness and 


464 OUR RELATIONS TO CHRIST 


loving patience that gathers up all the memories 
of the cross, and flavors by them even the divine 
greatness itself. Such is God, as the great Lamb- 
history paints him. Ask we then for the man? the 
man of the cross? this is he; not another Son of God — 
better than the trinity affords, but the very same that 
was before, more lovingly conceived, in that he has — 
brought himself down low to us, wading deep in our 
sorrows, and tasting even death for us and our sins. 

2. The other point to be considered and corrected is 
more simple, and may be dispatched more briefly. Thus 
it is an impression of many that we are to be with Christ, 
in the sense of beholding him with our eyes. But it can 
not be imagined that we are to behold God, whether — 
in three persons, or one, in this manner. The only 
beholding conceivable is that of faith. And there is a 
talent of faith in our human nature, that is much taller 
and closer to the infinite, than some of our wise unbeliey- 
ers have commonly dared to conceive. It does not re- — 
port things for knowledge, or cognitive perception, at 
some nervous center, as in the five senses ; and does not 
work below with them, ranging always in the same — 
field of matter and external fact, but it strikes out — 
into a wider and wholly different, where things 
invisible and above sense have their own other-world. 
God, and truth, and right, and love, and the eternal 
invisible heaven, report themselves to this faith-talent — 
when it is offered in congenial trust, and it is as if the — 
general overhead or whole sky of the mind were 
quickened with a sense above sense, wide enough te 


IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 465 


let in their evidence. It glimmers at no point, as 
when the five senses take in their knowledge, but it is 
the whole consciousness opened believingly to God, 
and the grand supersensible realities of religion. And 
so firmly pronounced is the conviction of the realities 
beheld by faith, that not even the realities of the 
senses are more strongly, often not as strongly, held. 
God, “‘the unknowable” as he is called, will some- 
times utter himself in the knowledge thus of a believing 
consciousness, more indubitably than a rock or a 
mountain seen by the eyes. Faith beholds more 
piercingly than they, looks farther in, sweeps a larger 
horizon. 

Besides, there is an impossibility, as regards making 
a heaven about Christ in terms of sight, which many 
have not considered. All sight objects are, by suppo: 
sition, under conditions of space. They spread, they 
have measures of extension, and the seers themselves 
must have room. Christ therefore can be had by the 
eyes, in the future life, only as being at some point of 
space, and having his beholders round him in space. 
Seeing, observe, implies just this, else we do not know 
what we mean by it. How then can we ever be with 
him, where he is? how get near enough to him, one in 
a million, once in an age, to so much as look upon 
him? Instead therefore of trying how to sharpen our 
apprehensions of Christ by making it a case for sight, 
we had better, far better, sharpen our ideas of faith, 
and learn its amazing capacity. O what revelations 
of Christ come to us even here—greater by a thou- 


466 OUR RELATIONS TO CHRIST 


sand times than the mere eye-beholders of the Son of 
Mary ever saw, when he walked the earth. How 
much greater then are to come, when the vision of our 
faith is purged, as it will be. Ah, if we could stop our 
singing “ When faith and hope shall cease,” and begin 
to sing “now abideth faith, hope, charity, these 
three,” into what more glorious, more inspiriting at- 
mosphere should we be lifted! And God forbid our 
ever passing to any other world where faith, the 
grandest of all human powers, has nothing any more 
to do. Indeed what are we here for, when the matter 
is sounded to the bottom, but to get our inward visu- 
alities unsealed for the all-perceiving, illimitable faith- 
sense discovery of God and his kingdom. 


Observe also this remarkable fact concerning faith, 


that it always sees the invisible in forms contributed 
by the visible; that is by what has before been seen, 
remembered, felt and wonted in experience. Thus it 
is how often that persons just born into the new life 
are taken by the conviction that they have actually 
seen Christ; which is true, in the sense that he has 
come into their consciousness, though not in the sense 
that they have seen him with their eyes. Faith has 
no draperies of its own, but is seeing its objects always 
in images borrowed from sense and memory. Thus 
beholding the state of the blessed, it imagines it to be 
a kind of sky-state and calls it heaven—adding gar- 
dens, and rivers, and gold, and gems, and a city that 
came down from God, even the new Jerusalem. And 
so when the Eternal Son, as in trinity, is beheld by 


IN THE FUTURE LIFE. 467 


faith he will be reclothed out of his earthly story, and 
it will even be as if there was a doubling back on the 
sight of his humanity. I do not say that our faith- 
perception will see the prints in his hands, or the scars 
on his brow, but we shall have him in the types of our 
memory, and think of him as the man of sorrows, the 
Lamb that bore our sins, the buffeted, the crucified. 
So that our being with him will be a beholding leveled 
eternally to our feeling, and a gloriously fresh partici- 
pation allowed us in the flavors of his humanly divine 
society. 


Let me now add in closing, what I am thoroughly 
aware of, that I have not been trying to set this great 
world of the future in fascinating colors, or to engage 
you in the pursuit of it, by fresher and more glowing at- 
tractions. I have not been preaching it, but engineering 
for it rather; I have not shrunk from letting it be a dif- 
ficult subject. And my reason for it is, the painfully 
fixed conviction of our being so far at loose ends in our 
conceptions, that steadiness of aim in the heavenly 
calling is scarcely at all permitted us. As to condi- 
tion, circumstance, sceneries, and surroundings, we are 
indeterminate of course. But it should not be so, in 
our conceptions of Christ himself and his relations to 
us. For if we are striving after him and to be with 
him in a mixture of contrary and impossible ideas, or 
to think of him in a kaleidoscopic play of figures 
that put us at cross-purposes continually in regard to 
his person, and to God and trinity as related thereto, 


468 OUR RELATIONS TO CHRIST, ETC. 


we are rather distracted and baffled than helped by . | 


the inspirations of our hope itself. Hence to persons 


of intelligence and thoughtfulness, there isa random _ 


look of undiscerning declamation in what is said of the 
great future, that costs them, in the loss of their re- 


spect, more damage than we often know. There 


ought to be a possibility of salvation for sensible 
people. But there hardly can be, if we leave the 
great subject of Christ’s future under vague, impossi- 
ble, or even contrary conditions. I have been try- 
ing to initiate a more fixed conception of it; speak- 
ing in the conviction that there is no other, in which 
the Christian disciple can better afford to dig even 
whole years, if he can fitly master it. In no other 
field will his advances yield him greater returns of 
strength. In this study he will have his religious 
ideas concentrated more and more about Christ. He 
will discover a new glory in Christ, and conquer a new 
stability centered everlastingly in him. He will think 
of his friends who have already crossed the river, and 
will seem to be apprehending a little what they have 
now apprehended, O how distinctly! and to be with 
Christ—who is now become his clear possibility and 
steady North Star light—he will hold himself to the 
mark and make sure progress. onward. 


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